Hot Rod Restoration: Mixing Primer

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Joel Jones, I own Jonesy's Inc., a company that specializes in auto restoration and customization. We're ready to mix our High Build, or Primer Surfacer and these are the things you're going to need to have right on hand when you decide to do that. The first is, you should have already read your paint mixing information that you can get off of any of the paint manufacturers' website. It tells you the ratios that you need to, it tell you the quantities, it tells you how, how much time in between coats, and everything you need so that you can have a successful painting experience. The next thing you're definitely going to need is you're going to need some disposable paper towels. These need to be, make sure that these are paint compatible, because if they're not sometimes you can have contaminants in here that will ruin your paint job. So you need to have paint compatible paper towels, a screwdriver's nice, mixing cups that have measuring devices on them. There's some cheating bars on here that allow you to quickly measure and mix paints in different ratios: 2:1, 3:1:1, 4:1:1, 8:1:1, and then also there's some basic ounces and milliliter gradients as well. The painting mixing between the hardener or the catalyst is critical. You shouldn't screw this up, if you screw this up then the paint either won't harden, which is the worst thing that could happen, and you're going to have to grind it all the way off, or it will harden too quickly and then not be compatible with the products you're going to be putting on top. So, you want to spend the money to buy these disposable plastic paint mixing cups. You're going to need stir sticks, where ever you buy your paint, when you buy your paint, they'll give you these for free as well as some strainers for when when you pour your product into your paint gun, and then obviously you're going to need your primer surfacer or High Build primer and then the proper hardener for your temperature. They usually come in slow, medium or fast, based on your spraying temperature. So, here we go, we're going to get ready and go ahead and mix this. I know that I need to mix this paint in a five parts to one part ratio. Five parts of paint to one part of hardener. So you pop it off, and what I always do is, you always want to shake these and stir these before you get ready. So, if, if you've got twenty four ounces capacity on this cup, and I need to mix five to one, I'm going to put in twenty of the High Build primer and then four ounces of the hardener and that'll give me a ratio of five parts to one part. I'm going to mix up forty eight ounces, which' ll get the ball rolling. You don't want to mix up too much paint because potentially it can get a crust and harden in the cup. So, whatever you can spray at once is when you, you want to, is how much you want to mix up. The general rule of thumb is, is that one of these cups you can dump into your gun and then if you've got a gun that's loaded, you can go ahead and mix one that's ready for you. So as soon as you load your gun mix another one up so that every time you come out of the booth you can have one ready and, ready to go into your gun. I always submerge a plastic cup inside so that you can very, very precisely pour the paint and scoop the paint out without making a major mess. Also this keeps the gallon jug clean so that the cap can always seal and you don't have paint running all over the side of your jug covering up all of your mixing information. On a lot of paint cans and paint labels, they have mixing information posted directly on them. Like this one right here, it says, "Five parts of this product to one part of the other product", and then it says "two to four coats of coverage". Again in your paint mixing information booklet it'll also tell you some basic gun setups. How much pressure you want at the tip of your spray gun, and then also how big of a fluid tip you need for the viscosity of this product. So I'm almost there to twenty, you want to leave the cup on the ground so that you can get a accurate measurement of where your, where your fluid level is, and you don't want to put too much hardener in, but a little more hardener's better than not enough. Not enough hardener is cause for trouble. So you fill that up to the twenty four, we went twenty ounces and then four ounces of the hardener to give our five to one ratio, and then you mix with your stir stick. You want to mix for quite awhile, because a lot of the stuff is thick, some of it is thicker than others and if you don't mix it for a long enough time, then you won't have good, consistent hardener to paint ratio. So after you get this mixed, you're going to take the strainer and pour it through a strainer into your gun. The gun tips, the strainer is really important because your gun tips are extremely small. Some of them are a 1.3 millimeters and some of them are 1.8. I'm using a 1.8 because this is a pretty, pretty heavy High Build primer. O.k., we got the paint mixed, I've got my suit on, we're already to go, I got the gun here. We're ready to load the gun, turn on the booth, get the gun pressure set, get the fan pattern set and the flow rate set and then we're ready to spray some primer. So, we're going to grab a strainer,you always want to strain the paint, no matter what. This is, this is important to do, these are disposable, the paint shops will give them to you, so you don't need to worry about using those. So you want to load up the gun, you don't want the gun to be full all the way to the brim. This is a thirty two ounce capacity gun and I'm filling it with twenty four. Which is just about as full as I like to have it. If you fill it anymore than that, then what can happen is, is that it can actually spill out of your cap and then get all over the place. Now, I, I see that I've got some in this filter and that's why you use the filters. This was a brand new cup and a brand new stir stick, but there still is contaminants, and if those contaminants get in the paint gun tip, then it's going to completely throw off your whole entire spray pattern. So you want to make sure your cap gets on there totally sealed, because you're going to be tilting the gun all different ways and you don't want the cap to come off and then spill paint all over the place. So, we're ready to go, I'm going to put the cap back on the actual primer. We're going to use more primer than this so generally what I would do now, is I would go ahead and I'd mix up another batch of High Build and have it sitting here waiting. It's good to mix the primer up and let it sit a little bit so that it gets, has a little more consistency to it. So I'm going to go turn on the booth and I'll show you how to set up the gun and we'll spray some primer."