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Date: July 10, 2007
Today was my first attempt at spraying a clear coat! Overall, it went pretty well, but there were some stumbles along the way.
Before I get into the clear coating business, I would like to update my dear readers on my battery test. So far, the logics have been running off a single charge battery for almost 12 hours now! So clearly, that's more battery than I need. This is a good thing, as it means I can buy a couple lower Ah rated batteries, and save some weight on the droid. I'm thinking a 2 ah 12v battery should do it. I'm hoping that since I'm getting more than double the hours of use from the battery rating, a 2 ah battery should get me more than four hours of life. We shall see. Either way, it'll be a lot lighter, and a lot more easy to manage inside the dome. I can probably hold it in place with a couple velcro tabs or something.
For reference, here's the place I order my batteries from: www.ragebattery.com
But on to the fun stuff. Today was clear coat day for the dome. This is the brand of coating I'm using for the dome and the body.
I went ahead and purchased a new respirator. This clear coat is not something you want to take chances with. I have an older respirator, but could not find any replacement cartridges for it. It's 30 bucks well spent, believe me. This isn't something you want to spray without a mask, or with one of those flimsy paper masks.
After spending about an hour trying to get the cans open, pouring it out, mixing it up, and getting everything prepped, I managed to spray a good coat onto the dome. You're supposed to put two coats on, about five minutes apart. I didn't have enough coat mixed up to do two coats, so one will have to do.
In general, I'm very happy with the way it turned out. It looks good. The bummer is that there's a bunch of little dust bits and whatnot that drifted into the finish while it was drying. This was to be expected, and I saw it coming a mile away. Still, I would have preferred it if they were not there. But since I don't have a spray booth, I'll just take what I can get.
With the little squirt of clear coat left in the gun, I blasted one of the legs. Turned out really nice.
And I think that's about going to wrap it up for the day. Pretty good progress. I'll have to see how the dome is tomorrow, as it needs 24 hours to fully cure.
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