Technical Mixing and painting with Centari acrylic enamel?

--Thanks again for all your advice, guys. Looks like 8-2-1 to start, then try on a horizontal scrap and adjust from there. Thanks Wizard and Alchemy.
--Jmountain, Uncleandy, Truck Dr and others, I will use a good respirator- thanks for that.
--BJR thanks for the pdf- that's where I will start.
--Guthrie and others, I also heard it goes on every thing. I will cover car which has to stay in shop cuz wheels are off. I will completely cover all the way to floor as I heard it will go under and get all over underside of car..
-- Highland- I get that. That makes it easy and I will try for consistency of milk

 

Jeeze, due to this paint being extremely dangerous and assuming you don't have access to an air-supplied hood system, I'd be thinking hard about prepping all four wheels then painting with a newer, safer product.

 

I wouldn't bet that Centari is much more dangerous that today's urethanes. SS and Clear both use nasty hardeners.
I did a few cars with the 2 part hardener system for Centari, and when cut and buffed, almost looked like lacquer! Much nicer than the single hardener pack.

 

Just wear the proper equipment when spraying it. Like I said, back when it was popular, there were still a bunch of old John Wayne types who thought that wearing a mask was an affront to your masculinity.

 

Listen to @chopolds , it's all nasty shit. Ventilation is as critical if not more so. Get that shit outta there and keep it moving long after the fog is gone. HVLP guns are no safer than the old ones, they just save paint with higher transfer ability. Fog is fog is fog is fog. A little or a lot, messy, sticky, hazardous, the end. Redundant I know, but the vapors, that smell long after the fog is gone, those are the monsters. Leave it alone while it purges.

 

All of the big 3 made good acrylic enamel, each with a different scent, but all would leave overspray everywhere, and like Lippy said, your shoes would stick everywhere also. Iron was a late '70's innovation, as were the hardeners for the enamel. Do wear your PPE, like a Tyvek suit and a good respirator at a minimum. How many of you remember Dulux?

 

Dulux? That shit NEVER hardened completely.

 

There is Centari acrylic enamel, and Centari acrylic urethane, the OP specifically mentioned acrylic enamel. The urethane would definitely be more toxic.

 

Painted a lot of farm / work trucks with Dulux . Friend that owned his shop had a 6 month special ,$100 dulux paint jobs about 1968 , said he broke even on the paint , made a killing on the body work ( 1/4" hardware cloth & bondo) rust repair !

 

@theHIGHLANDER , do you really believe the gloss enhancer/ UV inhibitor advertised by the acrylic enamel suppliers was unnecessary ? We used it because you could spot repair with lacquer for future damage .

 

In a utility use just coloring shit it wasn't necessary. At 1st it was alkyd enamel on frames, engine brackets, etc, lacquer for finish work. Then came faster drying acrylic enamels. Then came catalysts to speed up and harden. Then came crosslink urethane products and the rest is history. Safety was mentioned and really we don't need to get into PhD level discussions about product, molecular structure, viscosity, solvent richness or lack of, cure times, hardness durometer readings, recoat sensitivity, japan volume, binder content, isobutanes, toluol, esters, or aunt Millie's banana bread we eat between coats. Just sayin...

 

took a while to dig out an old tech sheet.

 

I use to love that stuff,sand it and buff it, it came out like glass! I too was stupid,just used a charcoal mask,not much else was available when I was spraying it.It's a wonder I'm still alive, knowing now how bad that stuff was..

 

I still have a gallon of Dulux in the basement. I’m not sure what to use for hardner, but I’ll use it for something. Maybe a trailer.

 

Thanks for that Scruffy!

 

Always get a flashback when i smell something alike. large gum balls esp. Used it for years refurbing x ray and ct equipment. Nasty shit I had a process for giving it texture for a more modern look.

 

Long since discontinued, I'm sure, but the number for Dulux hardener was 77S.

 

Good memory there, I can only remember seeing it one time, early '80's I'm sure.
An old timer once told the older timers would heat up the synthol (Dulux and other synthetic enamels) and spray it unreduced while warm. The same fellow would also spray enamel without a respirator, and claim smoking cigarettes helped make breathing the fumes easier. He died at 50, a victim of his zany ideas or Agent Orange perhaps, from an unusual cancer of the esophagus. I sure miss him, to this day.

 

Straying from the original post, but the last story brought back a memory. In the 60’s I was a little fella and I remember at the old salvage yard/body shop, my dad would take the lid off the gallon can half full of straight line enamel, set it on top of the coal burning stove. That paint, unreduced, would lay down like glass heated up like that. One particular time the phone rang with a customer, he gets sidetracked, and as he was passing back by the stove, the paint can had flames coming up out of it. He calmly grabbed the lid, layed it on the can and snuffed it out. He had a knack for keeping his cool in dicey situations.

 

8/2/1 after stirring, with your paint stick, pick up out of the paint and watch it run off the end of the stick back into the paint. The paint should produce bubbles from the droppings that will appear in 4 seconds if the viscosity is sprayable. The thinner the mix, the faster the bubbles.

 

Back in 99' I was diagnosed with iso-poisoning and that ended my career as a body shop manager.

I called dupont to talk to someone with knowledge and I ended up talking to their head chemist, hell of a nice guy and very informative too! He told me,at that time, as far as isocyanate is concerned there was no difference in harm between base/clear or enamel with hardener added. Said they were both equally as dangerous.

.

 

Do not under any circimstances spray it in a garage attached to a house. A guy around here did that back when it was popular and from what a mutual friend said made his family pretty sick in the process. Word was you could smell it in the house for quite a while and he ended up redoing a lot of it.
That outside away from everything that someone made is a real good suggestion.

 

Like @Mr48chev says, do not spray automotive paint where it's fumes may infiltrate your home. This applies to body fillers and fiberglass also, anything and everything will absorb those fumes, and will be giving you headaches of all kinds.

 

I sprayed a lot of cars with Centari 25-30 years back, 8022S reducer and the 2000 clear and hardener kit that you added to the paint. I saw one of the cars at a cruise in last year, a 69 XR7 ragtop and it still looked pretty good.

 

I use a small spray gun like this with a 1.0 mm tip for rims, brackets and other smaller areas and parts. It's much easier to control and saves material. It's a good tool for any home or pro shop. It even has an air pressure regulator built in. https://www.ebay.com/itm/1448631074...9Ky1HqZraGJSRt+VX0oLXVAtnw|tkp:Bk9SR5KW8_7AYQ

 

Any hardener that uses a form of isocyanate is extremely dangerous. I had a reaction to spraying urethane with hardener so I started to look for a automotive paint systems that did not use isocyanates. There is a company in Britain and Australia that make a paint but apparently they are not as durable. The isocycanate hardeners improve the gloss and the longevity of the paint. Centari 793S is an isocyanate type hardener so take all the precautions you can. Lots of ventilation, good mask, rubber gloves and tyevk coveralls as it can be toxic through the skin and eyes. Epoxy hardener is a different animal and is not as dangerous. We painted an airplane with waterborne urethane and an isocyanate type hardener that was advertised as eco-friendly that is completely misleading as it is every bit as toxic to humans as solvent reduced urethane with water being the only safe component.

 

A simple yes or no would have answered my questions

 

hmmmm,
Andy, have you opened that can anytime recently. My memory says that after some lengthy time that stuff would develop a beautiful glossy thick ‘skin’ in the can, atop the remaining paint…..

That whole scene takes me back to the ‘50s & ‘60s…….I love nostalgia!

Ray

 

Back when my wife and I were dating I lived in a crappy little apartment but it had a single bay garage I paid extra for. The landlord allowed me to paint cars in there as long as I painted his truck. The last car I shot in there was a red 68 SS chevelle. Centari with clear kit.

I wore a shoot suit, good respirator and a hat but no eye protection. That little garage with inadequate ventilation combined with no eye protection and of course...I glued my eyelids open. Not being able to blink is a no bueno! My future wife had to use reducer on q-tips to gently unstick my now beautiful red eyelashes.

I can't believe I lived through some of that stuff...good wife though. A couple years later we would build our first house and I would shortly thereafter kick her car out of the garage so I could build my Olds.

"Ah memories, we shall enjoy them." - Beldar Conehead

 

I wasn't going to tell this, but I once sprayed the underside of a Plymouth named after a cartoon character, and looked like a negative image of a racoon when i took my repirator off. I became a believer in rotisseries immediately.