Smith & Wesson 78G restore project

dvlnme wrote: just shows you how versitile a barby is eh.  cheers mike

Had a spare couple of hours and got the Matt black spray on. It went on ok, with a couple of smudges that would be mostly hidden under the grips. Sprayed and hung until just touch dry, then hung outside in the sun for an hour before barbecuing... heated at around 100-120 degrees for about 40 minutes then cooled under the hood.



The finish feels good - it doesn’t have that plastic feel spray paints can have and no tacky feeling. Slightly more sheen than original finish but pretty close and if nothing else will have a little more character than the original.

The top section had a nice even finish.. until it dropped from hanging! I caught it so no damage, but the finish needed to be stripped AGAIN, and is now ready to painted again when I have a spare minute.

This matt paint is a primer / paint apparently suitable for directly coating... (according to their marketing claims...) but I will try curing it in the hooded BBQ at around 100C. The wife may not be too please with spray paint fumed in the oven.. 

Cheers, yes it certainly won’t be original.
There is something charming about the original flawed finish though, so I went and got a Matt spray to test..
it may be closer to the original finish based on the small test piece. Not so much sheen.

So back to stripping! The spray comes off easier than the factory finish so it won’t take much to strip back to metal and try again!

With everything stripped of the paint, and given a good acetone bath / wipe down, I have started spraying the parts with satin black. The finish is slightly glossier than the factory finish, but I think matt would be too flat.. the factory finish must be somewhere in between and the satin will show less blemishes than the matt would..
speaking to Ron he said it’s easy to tell refinished S&W pistols as the finish is usually too good! You can see from the original in the pic that the finish is not perfect - designed as a functional tool rather than a show piece..

Question, should I proceed and be happy with the satin, or should I strip again(!) and try a matt black to see if it is closer to the original?

dvlnme wrote: damage like that is a classic case of someone not knowing what they are doing and totally stuffing something up in the process.the old storey eh!! if something not broken,you keep fixing it til it is broken ha ha,now you really do have something that needs fixing eh!!pity they dont know how to fix what they have broken trying to fix it before it was broke,worlds full idiots who consider themselves experts coz they seen it on utube and became instant experts on the subject.  cheers mike

dvlnme wrote: you could possibly vee out the crack and fill it with jb weld then flush it off clean out lettering again with dremel tool etc,that would disappear when painted,wont really be any stress on that area when assembled and being used.  cheers mike