The sides of the cab on my IJ are in great condition with very little fade but the same can't be said of the front round the coin door which has suffered in the sunlight. This has been bugging me recently and after trying to hunt down a replacement decal and looking at what was going to cost me I thought I'd have a go at touching it up myself (and then if I f*cked it up I'd bite the bullet and buy the decal). I followed a link from Ed Cheung's IJ webpage and came across someone who'd touched up a Black Rose cab using glass paints:
http://remote.kiwi.gen.nz/PinballPaint/
So after a trip out to Hobby Craft I set to work. First this is what it looked like before I started....
And these are the tools I bought. The blue was already good enough and I wasn't going to redo the yellow so just red and orange glass paints were bought....
I removed the gun shooter then unbolted the coin door and fed it back inside the cab so I didn't have to worry about disconnecting any wiring. I used low tack stencil tape to mask off the sun rays and then broke out the paints.....
Some things I discovered while doing this are the stencil tape didn't really work very well so when I removed it there was quite a bit of seep through which meant the lines weren't very sharp. This was easy to fix by holding a ruler against each line and then rubbing off the excess with a cloth with some lighter fuel on. The other thing to know is that I attempted to do 2 coats but glass paint doesn't seem to like this and when I put the 2nd coat on the first area it reacted with the first coated and looked crap. I rubbed this off using the cloth and lighter fuel and then repainted a single coat on that bit.
On the original cab the orange sun rays gradiate to yellow but it wasn't possible to replicate this effect by freehand painting. The Indiana Jones lettering also gradiate's to yellow like on the side of the cab so I had a go at freehanding this and I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.
http://remote.kiwi.gen.nz/PinballPaint/
So after a trip out to Hobby Craft I set to work. First this is what it looked like before I started....
And these are the tools I bought. The blue was already good enough and I wasn't going to redo the yellow so just red and orange glass paints were bought....
I removed the gun shooter then unbolted the coin door and fed it back inside the cab so I didn't have to worry about disconnecting any wiring. I used low tack stencil tape to mask off the sun rays and then broke out the paints.....
Some things I discovered while doing this are the stencil tape didn't really work very well so when I removed it there was quite a bit of seep through which meant the lines weren't very sharp. This was easy to fix by holding a ruler against each line and then rubbing off the excess with a cloth with some lighter fuel on. The other thing to know is that I attempted to do 2 coats but glass paint doesn't seem to like this and when I put the 2nd coat on the first area it reacted with the first coated and looked crap. I rubbed this off using the cloth and lighter fuel and then repainted a single coat on that bit.
On the original cab the orange sun rays gradiate to yellow but it wasn't possible to replicate this effect by freehand painting. The Indiana Jones lettering also gradiate's to yellow like on the side of the cab so I had a go at freehanding this and I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.
