Cabinet:
Restoration Continued:
And finally, some painting has been done. The white is a primer/sealer undercoat. It helps hide the old sideart, bare wood, and bondo. After that, I masked the sides and painted all of the black areas. This includes the top, rear, and the interior marquee and monitor areas.
The next trick was to paint the sides. To do this, I removed all of the side masking and then masked all of the black areas by wrapping a 25.5" wide sheet of plastic all the way around the machine, starting at the bottom rear, going up and over and then down the front. I taped the sheet to the T-molding edges all the way around. With the sides exposed and the rest of the machine masked, I then spraypainted the sides completely gray. I'm not showing photos of the plain gray sides here because that's, well, even more boring than what I am going to show you.
Now that the gray sides are done, here's the cabinet masked and ready for the blue artwork...
An interesting thing happened while I was painting over the mattes. The mattes are a bit heavy and a little flexible and they tend to naturally fall away from the cab wall a couple of millimeters. While painting any area, I just held a straight wooden paint-stir stick against the matte with one hand to keep it flat against the wall and painted with the other hand. Whenever I removed the stick, the matte would lift away on its own. This had the effect of completely eliminating any chance that the matte would get stuck to the wall as the paint dried. What a bonus! The biggest problem with stencils is that they can and do get stuck and sometimes some good paint comes off with them. Needless to say this is frustrating and nobody likes doing touchups afterward to repair the damaged edges. You might try to remove the stencil before the paint is dry but unless you're really carefull (and pretty lucky too), you'll likely smear the paint.
Here's the cab with the blue artwork completely painted. I haven't removed the masks yet because it's still drying. The picture on the right is showing some reflection from the camera flash near the "W". The blue actually turned out perfectly everywhere. You might be able to see a tiny line of gray along the edges of some areas. That's only because the matte is sitting a couple of mm's off of the wall and the camera is at an angle to it so you can see under the matte a little bit. When the matte is against the wall, there are no gaps in the artwork at all.
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