paint used as dye

[Vilas Schroeder]

Has anyone attempted to thin latex paint and spray instead of dying. I have some maple cabinets that they now want black. I was thinking of thinning paint for first coat and if the color is dark enough to spray lacquer on top of it.

[Scott Holmes]

Latex is a VERY POOR choice of paint to use in this application. The lacquer will most likely ruin it...

A quality oil based enamel or acrylic would be much better; no top coat needed.

[Tom McMahon]

I have not used latex but I have used thinned milk paint (both red and black) as a dye on raw wood and top coated it with shellac and then lacquer. It worked fine. It needed to be thin enough to soak in to the wood not sit on top. If your cabinets have a finish on them I think you are going to have adhesion problems.

[Joe Chritz]

Sherwin Williams Pro-Classic alkyd enamel.

It sprays great out of my DeVillbis finishline with the smaller needle set. Thin it 10% and ready to go. No top coat needed. Pigmented water bourne acrylics like target are actually a bit cheaper but I often have to match trim and it is easier to color match the pro-classic unless you have a really good paint guy.

Zinseer BIN primer is the bomb for an undercoat. Two coats primer, two coats pro-classic.

If you want the grain to show then you need to go with an ebonizing routine. A google search gives about a million different options.

Joe

[Neal Clayton]

agree with joe, i also use SW oil enamel, and with a similar application to yours. parting strips and jambs on traditional wood windows, you want colored but no modern paint will stand up to the abrasion. if you thin the paint enough that the wood will soak it up like a stain, you can do it that way.

if they want a painted look without any grain showing through, that's easy, as joe said just thin it a bit with some penetrol and spray away.

[Vilas Schroeder]

The guy at Sherwin Williams said the acrylic latex should work, just wanted to run this by the experts before I invested in the paint and ruined my project. I did some cabinets spraying water borne dye and than sprayed black acrylic lacquer for a top coat. It just seems like I had to put too much moisture on the wood with spraying dye to get the color I was looking for.

[Steve Schoene]

I expect you shopped at a consumer grade S-W paint store, not one of their commercial/industrial stores. Lacquer thinner does a very efficent job of stripping water borne paint.

[Norman Hitt]

Forget the paint, just shoot them with Black Lacquer. I've done furniture before with black lacquer and it really came out nice.

[Tom McMahon]

I still think you will have adhesion problems putting acrylic latex over a previously finished surface. You can do a simple adhesion test, put a small amount of paint on the surface, let it dry, put a ful strenght piece of masking tape over the paint, wait 24 hours, pull off the tape, if it does not pull off the paint you stand a chance.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Has anyone attempted to thin latex paint and spray instead of dying. I have some maple cabinets that they now want black. I was thinking of thinning paint for first coat and if the color is dark enough to spray lacquer on top of it.

Yep.
Many, many, many times.

Works fine.

Interior Latex paint, as in Latex wall paint usually doesn't react to NC lacquer.

Exterior Latex and/or some latex Enamels are a different story.
They may be alkyd modified so there's more "open time" for the coating to be applied.
These will react under a NC lacquer.

The thing to watch out for though is the black turning gray as it's drawn out.
Black latex wall paint usually has a small amount of Titanium Dioxide in it.

Forget the paint, just shoot them with Black Lacquer. I've done furniture before with black lacquer and it really came out nice.

That'd be more the way to go w/Maple. Not much in the way of grain texture there to accentuate (IMHO).

[Jim Becker]

Sherwin Williams Pro-Classic alkyd enamel.

Joe, does the alkyd version come in a deep tint base to provide dark colors like black? The acrylic version doesn't....or at least didn't the last time I tried to buy it that way.