Duracoat?

[casey1]

I'm thinking of coating my benchmade 525 with gold or white on the aluminum scales and one of my clips. is this very difficult? I've never disassembled a folder before, but i'd just wanna coat the outer scales and clip, not the axis, backspacer, or liners (maybe the thumbstud). is it fairly self-explanatory or do I need advice?
Edit: is it also easy to remove?

[JNewell]

Disassembly is (to me) incredibly simple and intuitive...YMMV, proceed at your own risk.

Surface prep is everything and with anodized aluminum you would ideally tread the fine line between scuffing up the surface enough to get a good bond with the DuraCoat and not removing the harder outside anodized layer. A maroon Scotchbrite would be about right. You don't want to go down to bare metal.

You will NOT get the DuraCoat off, at least not without blasting, if you prepped the surface and mixed and applied the paint correctly.

Airbrushing is the best way to apply this stuff, but you might not want this to be your first experiment with the process? It's your knife.

[casey1]

true... ok i have an extra BM clip so maybe i'll do that and see if that's enough pimping for me. for that, do i need to remove the paint?

[Blerv]

I'm thinking of coating my benchmade 525 with gold or white on the aluminum scales and one of my clips. is this very difficult? I've never disassembled a folder before, but i'd just wanna coat the outer scales and clip, not the axis, backspacer, or liners (maybe the thumbstud). is it fairly self-explanatory or do I need advice?
Edit: is it also easy to remove?

You might look around. There are people willing to Cerecoat/Duracoat knives and small items for $10-20 per knife. At that price I personally would rather mail it off.

I would Google around if you are interested in this.

[JNewell]

I was thinking about this while walking the dog this afternoon. I've done several firearms, and had good results, but they have varied somewhat in the surface finish. It depends on air temp, distance from the brush to the surface, whether I've used any thinner, and other variables. I think that the learning curve on a small object is such that I'm voting with Blerv, send it out somewhere unless you feel pretty bold or don't give a d@mn about how it looks or have previous experience. DuraCoat is a fabulous product with really great customer support, but applying it has got a little bit of a learning curve and in my experience smaller parts are harder than larger parts.

[dgulbra]

i sent mine out and it came back really good. I want to get into it but practice on something you dont care about first

[bowarrow2000]

Aluma-Hyde II from Brownells is another good product. I used it to recoat the scales on a BM 525. Surface prep is the most important and will take the most time. Follow directions to the letter and you should have a good product when finished.