Painting Front Sight on Revolver

I've used white appliance touch-up paint as well as a white paint marker on my blue guns which seemed to work well. Not so much so on my stainless guns. I picked up some cheap reddish-orange nail polish at Walmart for use on those, but it didn't work too well-- not bright enough. I guess model paint or jig-and-lure paint would be better, I'll have to pick some up. I don't particularly like zombie green, but it seems like that might give more contrast than red orange or yellow.
 
After a couple of days of trial and error I've learned a bit. First of all, serated front sights are way easier to deal with. The first gun I did was my 1911 which had plain black sights with a serated ramp front. Unfortunately, the guns I really wanted to do are a pair of K frame target guns with non-serated black front sights. I'm not sure of the terminology for this type of sight, but the rear facing part of it is 90* up/down relative to the bore axis and flat other than some minor tool marks.

The "paint" I bought is cheap nail polish (Jordana) from K-Mart. I bought 523 Edgy (which is a sort of dark orange that I thought would be bright), 502 white, and clear. This stuff is really annoying to work with. It begins to dry and turns gummy in about a minute or so. It doesn't actually fully dry for quite a bit longer (an hour or more...wait till you think it's probably dry...then wait another hour or so). If I try putting on an additional coat before the first is absolutely dry, the prior coat comes off as I'm trying to apply the new coat.

After I was reasonably happy with the first two guns (1911, and K22), it occurred to me to mix the white (which I'd bought as a base coat) with the orange. Mixing these roughly 1:1 (2 drops of each in the cup of a empty tray of small pistol primers) produces a nice light/bright orange that looks much better than the orange on its own.

I've had better luck applying the polish with a flat wood toothpick than when I was trying to use the nail polish brushes...and with the mixed polish, using the brushes isn't really an option anyway.

I've been using blue painter's tape as masking tape to control how far down the flat front sights I paint. Before removing the tape, cut the border with a sharp knife. Otherwise, some portion of the polish is liable to come off with the tape :(

Acetone will remove any overpaint, errors, or everything if you're not happy with it. I've been very careful not to touch the wood grips after messing with the acetone. If your grips have any sort of finish or are any sort of plastic, the acetone is likely seriously bad news for those...don't get any on them. I have a swiss army knife with my finger print embedded in the plastic from 20 or so years ago when I was cleaning tape residue off one of the blades with acetone.

painted-k38.jpg
 
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