How did the Chrome Aluminum paint turn out? I need to paint a bike part silver, but I wasn't sure which of the hardware store's 27 different varieties of silver spray paint to use. It's remarkably easy to end up with fugly silver spray paint job, and I want to avoid that.
You can sort of see how it looks on the rifle, but the lighting is bad. It's definitely obvious that it's silver spray paint, and not an actual chrome/steel/aluminum jobbie. On the other hand, I haven't managed to scratch it yet, and it seems significantly more resistant to chipping and variously otherwise getting hosed up than the Krylon Fusion is. One screwy factor with the look of the silver on iAR ("eye-are" Thanks, Harry!) is that it has a coat of Krylon Fusion Sketchy Matte Finish over it. It was five bucks at the hardware store, and it looks acceptable (well, as silver ARs go..) for five bucks spent. I hope some of that helped.
hope you used high-temp (engine) paint on certain parts?
A brief aside: it took me like six months to figure out your name. Maned Wolf. Like, a wolf with a mane. For the longest time I read it as Man-ed-wolf and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what the hell you were on about.
And no, it's all Krylon Maximum Sketch paint. I did poke around for "Heat" paints and "Grill" paints and "Engine" paints, but Ace didn't have any in the colors I wanted (who would want to paint an engine sissy schoolgirl white?).
Otherwise, that could get interesting after a long fast-firing session...
Regular spraypaint will bubble and flake off hot metal. Engine/manifold paint, which comes in silver and quite a few other colors, won't. In fact, engine enamel would just bake on and become a nice, hard finish.
Yeah. I expect my first time out is going to get a little grody. There's overspray (and, uh, just regular ol' paint) on the barrel and gas tube which I am sure will flake and burn and generally otherwise be gross with the swiftness when I take it to the range for its first post-painting shooting. I imagine that also the brass deflector, charging handle and maybe the delta ring and maybe the inside of the (heat-shielded, of course) handguards will also catch a butt-kickin' for being lawn-furniture paint on a gun.
This was my first time "refinishing" (shut up, I can hear you snickering) a firearm, and I didn't want to spend a hundred dollars on an airbrush and canned air or a compressor and a bunch of wacky products I'd have to mix up and screw around with and adjust and this-that-and-the-other just to end up with something stupid or irreparable. I figure the krylon is undurable enough that in time it'll flake, burn, bubble and get-the-hell-scratched-out-of-it away, and I can do something a little bit more sensible with my rifle.
Mags, especially steel ones, if disassembled and the follower taken out, could be painted with enamel and then baked for a few hours at low heat (check the manufacturer) to get a durable finish less likely to scratch off in the well. And, of course, I hope those weren't teflon-coated mags, or the paint's gonna come off.
They were "grey with shiny showing through the scratches" CProducts mags before I laid into them with the krylon. And if you look at the white mag that's on the bottom, I think you can probably see the scratchy, grisly results of my first attempt to stuff it in the paint-caked magwell. Woo!
Live and learn, and then send it to a gunsmith...
~GnSx
