Pulling a straight line is not as easy as it may seem at first.
Three things need to be controlled in striping - pressure, angle, and speed - they all need to be constant to pull a straight smooth line. All of these require aptitude not attitude. That being said - it is easy to pull a line - but not easy to pull a perfect line.
As for stiping graphics:
should go like this: bare metal; primer; primer sealer; basecoat; intercoat clear; graphics (base coats), intercoat clear, stripe, clear coat. You can stripe on the basecoat itself - but you better not screw up - it cannot be fixed without loads of work - in other words you can't just wipe it off. Striping on the intercoat clears will allow you to wipe up mistakes and also gets rid of ridges between colors if you are doing graphics - which when striped over will show the color ridge right in the middle of the pinstripe (usually the color even peeks through).
If you are going to clear over the stripe then you need to make sure you use a small amount of the clear CATALYST, not REDUCER in the striping material. Reducing with the wrong will cause a reaction unless the reducer is designed for 1-shot or equivalent (House of Kolor U-00 striping reducer for house of kolor striping materials).The idea here is that you cannot thin two chemically differnt paints with the same thinner. Buy the correct stuff.
The catalyst allows the striping material to not be reactivated by the clear and cause lifting.
*** experiment from last weekend - tried one shot on several different panels - some times it was mixed with some catalyst for the clear sometimes not. Then cleared the project panels. No lifting anywhere. Rule of thumb - use the catalyst anyway. It can't hurt. ******
As for tapes - there are dozens of different types of tape that can be used. I use the "old green - 3-m fineline", which is more like a gray, striping tape. Can do small bends, but nothing drastic. For sharp curves I'll pull lines with 3m blue fineline. If using wide tapes to pull lines - remember the outside edge the tape being pulled around corner is the only smooth edge you can work off of. The remaing tape will wrinkle - has to go somewhere. The small blue fineline will stretch around bends really well unless of course it get's too sharp.
I recently painted a 75 Gold Wing - had several different colors of wide stripes done on a basecoat. I taped these off. Followed these stripes with a pinstripe on their edge using the Mack 00 sword striper trimmed down by about half.
- Ryan
