The refractor and lamp are from my M-400A2. I've put the gray paint on my M-400A2 but won't be putting the clearcoat on mine till this weekend since it's been rainy lately... the NEMA tag is a custom one printed off the computer and sprayed with clear paint to waterproof it. The font is dead-on with the old one, which was a 400W HPS tag.
Yeah yours actually turned out way better than mine! I did like you said and waited for the gray paint to fully cure (it was at least a week) and today i just put the clar paint on and to my horror, the gray paint started cracking a peeling off from under the clear paint!!!! AAAAAAAGGGGGGHHH!!!! I guess this is what i get for mixing paint brands but after the paint is cured it shouldn't make a difference, should it? I don't know what the heck happened but I'm fuming right now. Oh well, I guess i'll see how bad it looks after it dries and see if I need to repaint it again. Don't worry, yours is fine except for that one spot on the top housing. Mine has those ugly peels in random spots all over the place. Another thing i should note is the presence of air bubbles under the gray paint. I went and got a thumtack and popped the bubbles and pressed the paint back against the housing and it looked okay. Still looks terible IMO...
What the heck!! The gray should have dried fully after a week! Sorry that happened...I'm afraid it's going to have to be repainted,those bubbles won't stick... If the paint is that soft still you may be able to remove it with a rag soaked in thinner wiping or scraping it instead of having to sand it. If there is that type of reaction occuring for some reason then it seems applying the clear coat while the paint is still tacky may be the safest bet...I was hoping that you would've had great results.
I mentioned it to my dad and his explanation made sense: When the paint dries, it "shrinks" and this time of year, the sun is very strong and if the paint dries too fast, with will wrinkle the paint underneath. I thought that was crazy and reached down and touched the fixture and sure enough, the clear paint was dry as a bone after five minutes! But what I don't get, is that the gray paint peeled off just like laytex paint in the spots it had damage but it's fine on the rest of the fixture. So I'm going to sand the areas where the paint got messed up and give it a third coat of gray and then apply a clearcoat and make sure I paint in the shade lol. I was pretty mad, but I got to go the ReStore today, which had a crapload (or should i say truckload lol) of goodies, including two Magetek .75A F40/RS ballasts, A 1998 Fisher Pierce open cap in the box, a medium base NOS no-name (but made by Philips) 100W E17 HPS lamp from the 90s, six starters, two inside etch GE F15T8/CWs, a Sylvania lifeline era F15T12/CW, a spool of over 100ft (probably 150 or close to 200ft!) of round black cord (18AWG three wire, which is exactly what i use for fluorescent fixtures), some /WW OSRAM PL13 lamps, and maybe some more stuff too. I'll post pics of it all. I spent less than $20 too!
Also there that i didn't get, a new incandescent exit sign, minus the box, from plastic construction. And a shoplite with a BenchLite ballast. the ballast was rated 0.85A but it looks like a cheap LPF ballast so I didn't know if it was worth getting.
Yeah the quick drying could be part of it,but odd it's only in spots which lead me to believe that those areas were still "soft" due to being a little bit thicker coating possibly and still not fully hardened even after a week.If the paint smell is still quite strong then it's not quite dry yet. I had a similar situation on a couple hydraulic cylinders I repainted,I waited several days after priming them, but there was a little bit of wrinkling near the bottom edge where the primer was a little thicker while the rest of cylinders were fine. Nice finds you got at ReStore. I went to ReStore the other day and found some NOS Canadian made incandescents and picked up a NOS 18" fluorescent strip that was missing parts,I wanted it mostly for the electronic ballast,she was going to charge me $5.00 for it and I said $5.00 for that? It was missing a lampholder and the ends so I got it for $2.00 lol.
Yeah. Maybe I'll skip the clearcoat this time around and just put on a couple more coats of gray instead. The clearcoat makes it more shiney but it's an uneven shiney. I like a nice uniform coat. It's hard to apply the coeat coat evenly because you cant see it. So i always end up putting too much and it drips down or i don't put enough and the paint is rough.
The clearcoat is so the light doesn't get scratched from handling. If it was going to be installed right away I wouldn't bother with the clearcoat but the pewter gray and hammered silver scratch off easily since they're not enamel. The smoke gray and white paint i use on my fluorescent lights can get tossed around and it won't chip or scratch. Might scuff a little and that's it. I wish Rust-Oluem made pewter gray because Rust-Oleum seems to make higher quality spraypaint IMO.
Could the fact that the gray paint was Krylon and the clearcoat was Rust-Oleum have anything to do with the strange spots?
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Also there that i didn't get, a new incandescent exit sign, minus the box, from plastic construction. And a shoplite with a BenchLite ballast. the ballast was rated 0.85A but it looks like a cheap LPF ballast so I didn't know if it was worth getting.
Could the fact that the gray paint was Krylon and the clearcoat was Rust-Oleum have anything to do with the strange spots?