It's been a good week to leave Lil' Queeny's new color band to cure; I've stayed occupied with Mom's visit. But I have gotten out into the shop for a little work here and there.
Another finish to reveal has been the interior window frames. These are the pieces that both cover the rough opening edges, and hold the screens for the windows that open.
Why now? Well - I plan to enlist these to assist my masking efforts in painting the exterior body color; a frame to lend support for the paper.
The frames are made of extruded aluminum - like the rest of the window metal, but with our interior color scheme we didn't want the detraction of the original aluminum mill finish. DW suggested early on, after she came around to actually LIKING the cream plastic trim (she hated that at first), to paint the aluminum window trim the same color as the interior plastic molding.
I've never been big on covering a perfectly serviceable non-rusting metal with paint, but I kind of liked her suggestion for the matching color, even knowing that some of the window aluminum would be visible as well, but that would be behind the screen, which would act as a visual boundary.
The first step was to clean the pieces. I have tried a variety of aluminum polishing techniques to ease labor, but haven't cared for any of them except the results from standard old-school elbow grease. Adding a bit of lubricant to 0000 steel wool seemed to work best, the lubricant being in the form of mineral spirits, Naptha, or some such.
I even tried the 24 hour soak in an acid bath (we had a bunch of remaining Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi from a party we had two and a half years ago. It didn't work; I dumped two cases down the drain).
But here's the stack after cleaning.
Sparkly! It wasn't too difficult; you just have to put in the time. But it tells me the exterior windows can be done well, although they will be much harder with more metal and harder areas to get to.
That was all before Mom got here. Later, I'd sneak out a little at a time and the first step was to get the self etching primer on.
And upon drying, the color. This was again a Rustoleum product in spray can. Antique White Gloss Enamel to be exact. The tone was almost a perfect match to the interior cream trim, but the finish was wrong. The plastic trim originally had a gloss finish but became satin or matte through use of steel wool to clean years of discoloration and buildup from it's surface. So I toned down the gloss enamel with a Matte finish Clear Coat Enamel.
And it would have worked too! Had I followed the instructions. Aww but alas and alack, I felt hurried. Why? Stealing moments in the garage while Mom is visiting? I know, but it's just me. That's an example too of why I work alone. When someone is helping me, I feel I have to keep moving, and end up rushing or not thinking it through fully, or whatever, because I don't want to use up their time.
Someone helping generally ends up costing me greater difficulty. Like the extra electrical work I had to do after my neighbor buddies helped me with kitchen demo. Yes, they wield a Saws-All very well - no doubt about it.
So the instructions (checked later) say to use the matte clear coat within - I think - one hour of the paint coat, or to wait 48 hours. And to use 2-3 thin coats instead of a heavy. I ended up spraying AFTER one hour, but WELL before 48 hours, AND I sprayed a relatively heavy coat too! It can be hard to see clear coat go on if the light isn't just right, so I purposely laid it down heavy enough to see the nice full coverage.
It lifted the antique white. But I walked away and let it dry unmolested.
Next day, upon close inspection, it actually was a pretty cool look. Most of it was just a very light and even alligator skin effect. But, there were some "worser" spots.
Also, I had painted one frame that I hadn't intended to paint, that of the bathroom window, which due to that room's color choices, I had wanted to leave in the aluminum mill finish.
Those frames that had the bad effect (about 4 smaller areas) got some smoothing sand paper and were resprayed correctly - and those came out just fine. The worst frame was one of the three same-size small windows (cab-over side windows and bathroom), and so it got the paint remover.
Which worked very well. It's now back to mill finish, and the rest are finished too. I didn't get pictures.
Tomorrow I'll show the added screens over in Exterior.
