Hi Joe
I got your email while we on vacation, and of course, I didn't respond at that time and forgot to after that.
Sorry about your roller effort didn't work for you. but as we discussed on the phone, I think ? you need help to do that, one rolling on the gel with the roller, and someone right behind you with a really soft brush to "tip it" lightly, evening out the gel, and smoothing it out as well, you must have had a deep roller, or soaked the roller heavy, I use a short nap roller when I done that, 1/4" nap, the foam roller would be ok, but they come apart, you just need to cover the project, not too thick.
Looking at your test panel, you got a Lot of flake there, makes for more orange peel that's hard to work with, but you are gonna have that any way, just a Lot less when you use less flake and put on more coats reduced for a thinner smoother coverage, that's what works for me anyway. The base color is the color you select, the flake makes the base color dazzle, It takes a Lot of flake to get 100% coverage all right, but you don't have to put it on all at once, several coats with a spoon full of flake works best for me, don't stop up the gun, thin it down some, quite a bit, and anyone looking for a place where the flake don't cover the base color is just looking too close. The flake make's it sparkle, and looking from across the harbor, or the street, it's dazzling, looks good. I don't have all the percentages, Jerry knows all that, and he's usually right, I just put in what works for me with out having to figure stuff like that out, but thinning the flake coats, less flake, gives you more depth to the appearance, then you must add several coats of just plain clear, if you add three coats of clear with flake, add 4 coats of plain clear, not thinned so much, that way you don't have to worry about sanding into your pretty red flake, that will make it look like you added silver if you are using metal flake, small black lines it you are using a polyester flake, either way you don't want to sand into the flake. Remember, we are re-coating boats, backwards from when they were built, when they were built, the clear was shot into a mold, a Lot of it, then the flake was shot onto the clear, and a Lot of that, then they layed up the cloth, or shot it with a chopper gun to build the hull, but now that we got the old boats, 30 years later, we got to go at it the other way around, and trying to make them look perfect.
Something I didn't share with you on the phone, "my bad" I drilled out the orifice on my primer gun to shoot the flake ? don't really know to what size ? I bought a dump gun, that was an experience for sure, point it up towards the ceiling going to project, pull the trigger, then point it to the project, never releasing the trigger until it's empty, if you do it drips product onto the project, it's not a valve, then release as you point it back up to the ceiling, and if that don't sound like a mess, you haven't used one, but if you want to try one you can have mine, really, I think they are great for making molds, and I bought a couple nozzle's to go with it, Oh, then you got to buy the cups and plastic bags that goes with it, pain in the butt for me, I put it on the shelf, drilled out my primer gun and went back to work.
I used 6 ounces of flake on the gold boat, 8 ounces or Gary's boat, that was a Lot of flake in my opinion, but I had to mix more green in that one, he wanted more green than aqua, but one that one didn't sparkle any more than the others, just appeared to be more green. I used 11 quarts of clear, with and with-out flake on both, I think, I think maybe more clear on Gary's boat, it was Dazzling, Barb helped me on the gold boat, but I don't think she did on Gary's boat, but she would remember, we mixed up all the flake coats, several coats, and didn't add the mekp until I was ready to use them, shot the flake coats and clear coats all at once, took a long time it seemed, only adding the wax in the last top coats, come out a depth about as thick as a nickel, maybe a new penny. Adding wax is a "seal" to help cure the gel, you don't have to use it if you want to wait on it to cure, but it is quite an advantage for a quicker cure, but you Got to get all the wax off to shoot another coat of anything, I use mek for that and everything else, lots of it, before sanding. On a base coat, like Jerry said, make that like a finish coat, add the wax to the top coat of your base color, make that coat like you want your finish to look like, then wipe it down with mek, sand it to the finish you want, then wipe it again with mek, or it will cause "fish eye's" like you had wd-40 sprayed in the shop, or refrigerant, any kind of penetrant in the air, oil in the compressor will do the same thing, but wax being left on the color coat will do the same thing. Just sanding does not remove all the wax residue, wiping it down with mek will, and it's important to use multiple rags to do that.
Depth to a flake finish is what's Dazzling, if you put all the flake on top of the base color, you got a pretty finish, and it sparkle's but when you put the flake on in several coats, depth, you get a deep dazzling finish, just takes a Lot of time and work. When someone use's a metallic paint on a project, you can only see the metallic that is close to the top of the paint job, that's really thin paint ya know, all the rest of the metallic is covered up by the color, you only see the sparkle of whats laying on top of the thinned clear paint, we don't do gel coat that way, we put the base color down then we add the sparkle, thin coats with flake, give it some depth, put Lot's of clear, spend a week sanding and polishing, hoping we don't get into the flake itself, and being absolutely amazed at our work when we get done, and if anyone want's to look close enough to find imperfections ... they are just lookin too close, tell them to back up some.
All that said, is why I'm going to Paint my next one with the PPG products.
