AX84 Hi Octane build Part 3: Ruining the finish

A word about finishing metal...

This is the third metal enclosure I finished.  The first two were metal stompbox effects units.  I'll start with the worst; a compressor from Build Your Own Clone.  It's a nice pedal, and he sound is great, but I tried to hand paint, and it was a miserable failure.  It's terribly ugly.  It would have looked better had I just left the aluminum bare and written the knob labels on the thing with a sharpie.  Once I saw how terrible it was, I said screw it, globbed a bunch of paint on it, and embraced the ugly.  It is a nice compressor though, so maybe I'll refinish it at a later date.

The first one (the Tube Screamer), I spent a long time on the finish.  I sprayed very thin layer of paint every 15 minutes or so, and then I let it sit over night between the primer, the color, and the clear coat.  Between the color and clear coat, I also baked the case in a toaster oven I bought at thrift store.  The baking isn't necessary, but if you bake the unit for an hour at 300-350F, the paint will almost completely cure, and when you handle it, you won't get finger prints embedded into the soft pain, or mar the surface.

I rushed through finishing the AX84 chassis.  I put the clear coat on too thick and got runs in the paint, and then I didn't let it cure enough before I installed the pots, switches, transformers, etc.  The toaster oven won't fit this chassis, and I don't want to bake it in my cooking oven, so I just left it outside over night.  I thought 9 hours of drying time would be sufficient for curing, but I was wrong.  I really dinged up the finish.  It looks pretty bad in places... and goes to show the importance of patience if you want your piece to look nice.  I'm going to build this amp into an enclosure of some sort, either a combo amp or a stand alone guitar head, so I'm not too concerned with how it looks.  A few coats of clear coat would have been fine to prevent corrosion, but I gave it color on a lark.  If nothing else, I learned how important the patience I used on the tube screamer pedal really pays off.

So here it is!

Doesn't look too bad, eh?

Parts installed

Inside

Oh no! The finish!   I killed it!

That texture there is from the a seam in my pants.  Seriously

Tightening nuts ruins your finish

That's a finger print and a few nicks.

That's probably from my heavy paint layers

Took a nice ding out of the side there... oops.

Oh well, I'm going to wallow in shame for a while, and then finish up the wiring.