Arrowhead, have you read this
(click here) ? It may be of help.
Spraying frames and similar items is taxing even to the most experianced painter. Don't feel bad, it is very easy to get a run on these irregular shaped parts the lots of nooks and crannies.
A few things to watch out for are first off, don't narrow your spray pattern much. I remember having a guy show me how to paint a motorcycle frame back when I was a kid. He showed me how you narrow the pattern down to only a few inches so there isn't a lot of paint blowing past the frame being wasted. He also would turn the cap so the fan would spray horizontal when he sprayed the vertial tubes. Luckily I soon would be able to watch others paint to find out these suggestions were all
wrong. At least, never done by any painters I had ever seen and I never use these techniques as well. Well, at least not to any great degree. Sure, here are times you use them, but not to any great degree by any means.
So, paint it like you would a fender, a normal 8-10 inch fan and just swing the gun with your hand anyway needed to get the paint and clear where you want it.
The following tip is probably the most important, and the hardest one to learn. Don't apply more clear to any one area. With each coat, ONLY apply that ONE coat EVERYWHERE. Now, that is darn hard to teach doing a fender, so on a frame it is REALLY hard. But that is the trick.
That paint and clear should be able to be mil checked and find it almost perfectly the same thickness at any point on the part.
Picture each coat as being a sheet of plastic gift wrap. You ONLY want one layer with no overlap of this gift wrap. So, you lay one layer up to a certain point and then when you lay the next sheet to meet up with it you don't want it to overlap. So when you are done the entire thing has exactly the same amount of layers on it.
Now, this is not to be confused with "overlap". Your passes with the gun have to "Overlap". I am refering to the layer of clear you create WITH that over lap, it shouldn't be "overlapped"
again creating twice the thickness.
On that frame, you should shoot for almost no overlap with your passes, because whether you try or not, you WILL get overlap because of the small size and the angles you are painting. In other words, one pass will easily cover the side of the rail, don't spray it too wet. You would then hold the gun at a right angle TO THE EDGE OF THE CORNER and get that, the overspray off the side of pattern will re-wet the side, apply the perfect amount on the edge of the corner and then get a nice semi-wet start on the bottom. The pass following it on the bottom will re-wet the "overspray" from the pass you made on the edge and without any trying what so ever that edge will get "re-wet". If you "try" to get some more on that edge, you WILL end up with too much there.
This gets very, VERY tricky when you are painting crossmembers on a frame. As you get to the end of the crossmember where it welds to the frame, you have to REALLY watch how much you apply, keep it light, VERY light as you get to the end of the crossmember. A LOT of "overspray" from that crossmember will be DIRECTLY applied to the side of the frame where the crossmember welds to it. WELL, when you spray your pass on that side rail you CERTAINLY don't need any more there, you already have your "layer of plastic" there. So, when you come back and spray that rail you DO NOT have to get back in that corner where the crossmember welds to the rail, or you WILL be applying too much there.
As a kid I worked in a full on restoration shop as a painter. I would paint frames and the like all the time. The owner of the place taught me an interesting concept that I have used throughout the years. "Move your dry spot around". He didn't mean to teach me this to paint frames, but rather painting lacquer completes. When painting fifteen coat lacquer paint jobs, if you keep ending every pass on every panel exactly the same you end up with a dry spot that builds on it's self and you have this one area with different texture,and amount of paint. An example of this is right where a door meets a fender, 15 coats all stopping right at that seam, you have a super duty dry spot.
Well, this training helped me to learn how to put an even layer of paint (or primer or what ever) on the entire thing.
You can "move the dry spot" around with three coats in exactly the same way. When you see a candy paint job where the color is darker at different points on the car, this method was NOT followed. Those dark spots are proof, he applied to many "layers of the plastic gift wrap".
