Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

My little re-paint of my engine is in hiatus.  My main base had some adhesion problems, either the Dupli-Color didn't like the Rust-Oleum Primer or I wasn't careful enough getting it / keeping it clean before painting with Bright Red.  So, I reset the painting on the base again (the sub bases seem okay).  As they say, 80% of the effort on painting is prep work:

• Bought Dupli-Color Perfect Match Primer.  I suppose if you are going to spend crazy amounts of $$ on paint color might as well buy matching primer.
• Bought their cleaner/de-waxer too.
• Tack towels to use with Dupli-Color cleaner/de-waxer.
• Dupli-Color Perfect Match Clear/Gloss Top Coat, if and when I get that far!

I have the base re-stripped/sanded to bare metal and two paint sessions with their primer.  Wet Sanded (600) 1st round of primer, dawn soap water wash, then Dupli-Color cleaner, and then 2nd pass at priming.  Then wet sanded 600 again, dawn soap water wash, and then Dupli-Color cleaner - ready for painting!  But now bad weather is rolling in, 100° humidity as I am typing this and thunderstorms until tomorrow.  But at least I got the base ready for Bright Red.

I also pulled the rivets of the stand offs and I am corresponding with hansonrivet.com to get new ones.  I believe they will be 1/8 semi-tubular truss rivets.  Though I'll need to get a 3 inch reach hand squeeze rivet tool to reach all the rivet points (not a cheap tool).  I'll use 4-40 round head stainless steel machine screws until I sort out rivets.