Well, I ended up taking a picture of the final sanded surface. This is where we left off last time. I mixed up a batch of the Japanning per the recipe on the website listed in the previous post.
First step, mise en place. Everything in its place, ready to roll. First use acetone to clean off the surfaces to be painted. After I got done sanding I hosed it all down with WD-40. Remember folks, the WD means Water Displacement. Great for keeping fresh steel from rusting, not a great lubricant. Wipe it all down real good with acetone to remove all the oils and other WD-40 junks from the surface.
Ready for first coat of japanning.
The first coat goes on really thin... reallllly thin...
A bit blobby, but this shouldn't be perfection.
Done with the first coat. By the way, this stuff is really smelly, must do outside. Yuck.
First coat on the frog as well. These are the only two parts that get coated. Not all surfaces are coated as some of them are sliding surfaces. Everything on the web said to let it sit for several hours, then add a second coat. So I did that.
Looking better with the second coat. The interwebs said to let it sit for a while then bake it at 400F for 1 hour. So I did that.
mmmmm... toasty... the smell of off gassing turpentine and asphaltum is divine.
Ding! All done. Not too shabby.... but still not quite good enough for me. Still looks a tad brown and it's not built up enough around the cast markings. Time to add another coat and do a bit of experimenting. This time I tossed it in the oven at 160F for 1 hour to burn off the solvent, then turned it up to 425ish-F for 1 more hour.
May not be so easy to tell in the pictures, but this looks much better. My experimenting worked as planned, the coating didn't have time to slump since I burned off most of the turpentine, so by the time I turned up the heat to melt the asphaltum, nothing ran and it looks pretty good. It feels like a pretty hard coating, so I think this will do the job. It's also difficult to see in the pictures but the freshly polished cheeks and sole turned a bit brown from the cooking process, which I expected. Any trace amount of oil on the metal will dry and start to polymerize. This is the process of seasoning cast iron cooking pans. But since I don't plan on needing a good non-stick cooking surface, I sanded the exposed metal with 320 grit.
Ahhh.. look at I shine! (ignore nasty finger prints). Put the frog back onto the base, gave all the exposed metal a light coat of oil, and we are done with these parts! Now lets move on to the iron.
It's so shiny!
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