The weather was perfect for spending a day in the garage painting today, so I made good progress and finished the white paint on the Space Shuttle cabinet! Same procedure as before. The mask is applied in sections, one at a time:

The white spray paint goes on and the mask is peeled:

Cool! My results are much better than my first attempts with the red paint. I learned from my mistakes the first time around and did it one side at a time. When the mask is peeled with the paint still wet, the lines are much nicer and crisper. It’s definitely tricky to get the alignment just right, and mine isn’t perfect, but keep in mind the factory didn’t get the alignment perfectly either. I’m happy with it!

Did you notice my little block of wood in the first picture above that looks a bit like a Russian flag? It’s my paint test block! The next step in the cabinet restoration is for the whole thing to get clear coated with a matte clear, but I first wanted to do some tests to see how it would look. I painted not only the top of the backbox in matte clear, but also my little paint test wood block which has all three colors. I masked out a few lines through it to see the difference compared to no topcoat then sprayed it with the matte clear.

When viewed straight on, the difference is not super visible…

But when you’re at an angle that catches the light, it’s clear (ha, ha!) that the matte clear does a great job at reducing the sheen of the gloss layers below.

I’ll let this dry and re-evalutate the results later, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be clear-coating the entire cabinet with this matte clear.