Chimney Repair

After my Friday Fail, I received a lot of great feedback on how to salvage things. Some of the best suggestions - including using this "fail" as an opportunity to develop a new method of weathering (call it "zip taping" or somesuch...) - I finally decided that most of those ideas would tend to bog me down. I really appreciate folks weighing in, but in the end I just decided to reshoot it and keep moving forward.

This time, I masked the top of the concrete/stone base with Tamiya tape, then regular masking tape, then newspaper, as you see in the above pic.

Chimney all ready for respraying

Resprayed. Total time to this point, maybe 10-15 minutes, tops.

Unfortunately, as you can see, even the Tamiya tape peeled up some of the underlying paint. Based on the feedback I got, this is due to one - or all - of the following:

• Failure to clean the parts to remove any mold release
• Failure to do a primer coat
• Failure to wait long enough for the paint to well and truly cure

No worries though. Even stupidity such as this can be corrected...

I decanted a little bit of the spray paint into a bottle cap . . .

and then used a business card (no adhesive!) as a mask to allow me to touch up the paint with a small brush.

Should have taken this pic closer (click to enlarge), but hopefully you can tell that it's all nice and uniform now. No chips!

And here's the painted - though not yet finished - chimney. I still need to paint the cap the same color as the base, not to mention spraying some black inside (which I probably should have done first).

After adding mortar lines to the brick (likely subject of my next post, since I'm in the process of experimenting with different techniques), I may opt to Dullcote it to seal it well before doing any weathering.

Be sure to let me know if any upcoming pitfalls occur to you!