DIY: Repainting my 308, Lessons Learned after a Year behind the Trigger

[Oddball Six]

For those with ADD, we start with gratuitous gun porn of where we end the story:

Lessons Learned after a Year Behind the Trigger

Compared to many here, I am still "wet behind the ears". I got into shooting with USPSA and IDPA and moved over to rifles because I like the challenge that range shooting represents. Different challenge, different knowledge, different skillset entirely. Less quick twitch, less controlled movement, more control and focus, period.

I built a .308 last year because I wanted to learn the Remington 700 (clone) platform, soup to nuts. Having had a professional build done before, used before, and sold before, I knew a general idea of where I wanted to end up, but a lot of the specifics were based on what I could get in the market.

I have spent the last year shooting what I built. It's not a bad rifle. For a stick assembled out of parts by an amateur, its a great start, but here is what I learned that went into some updates this year:

* Go buy a cheap stick and shoot the hell out of it first. Do a custom build after you are so angry and tired of the off the shelf rifle, you can spit. By then you should know the 1,000 that are "just wrong" about how it works and how it feels, should be pretty familiar with the platform. Will save money.

* Spend some time at the range, but spend some time ON the range too (get out and shoot where you want to take animals if you can). Stuff that works ok on a bench (rings, cheek spacing, etc) may not be as great a configuration when you are in the weeds or taking the first few (or few dozen) coyotes|elk|rabbits|paper targets|whatever. As it ended up, my rings were too high, which meant my cheek weld was unnatural and strained after a while.

* If you decide to paint your own rifle, spend some time on the job. I wasn't very happy with what my handiwork looked like when I was done with it. Certainly nothing I would call pride. A few months in, it never gets "better", you only realize more crevices where you were not careful or where the paint didn't get to, etc. If it shoots good, well and great, but the little things still annoy you because you know you could have done better and didn't.

Changes for this Year

Going into this shooting season, I addressed some of the places where I was unhappy with a few pretty straightforward changes. All of them were pretty cheap.

Went from a 20MOA base to a 0MOA base. Most of my coyote shots arent at huge range, going with 0 moa lets me use lower rings. Restored some of my elevation adjustment in the turrets (my re-zero didnt eat so much of my elevation) even if it meant I gave up some distance overall.

Replaced my burris rings with higher quality USO rings with adjustable windage. MUCH lower to the boreline. Allowed me to lower my cheek positioning and adjust my overall shooting position to be much more natural.

Replaced the used "old style" remington that was used when I got it with a much crisper adjustable X-mark pro that was a "New, takeoff" from someone else's build that I was able to set at a more consistent 3.5#. It's not where I want to end up, but its certainly a step forward.

My new paint scheme also was going to be done much more carefully, and focus on a heavier presence of the tan and grey palettes of fall/winter colorado plains. My first attempt last year just was not high enough contrast. At a certain point, it ceases to matter much, but I wasn't happy with what I did last year, and I knew I wanted some harder contrast lines, simulating the brush and tumbleweed around here.

 

[Oddball Six]

The first step that I started with doesn't have any sexy pictures, it's really going over my rifle with a good cleaning and taking it apart. Once completely taken down to components, I used a little bit of fine sand paper to remove the prior krylon and high temp enamel where it made sense to do that.

It's the end of winter out here on the high plains of Colorado. I figured out where I wanted to go next with the paint job. Getting brush is hard to do right now, so I planned to buy some. The main thing that I care about is getting some branch shapes. Some of the ranches where I like to go after coyote, I know I am most active in the autumn with that, and that there are some fence posts, copses of trees, and the ever present sage and tumbleweeds that I will be using to get some basic obscurity to go after these suckers. Using the same rifle to go after elk is very much secondary, so I am ok going with tans and browns pretty much exclusively.

I started with a quick run at Lowes. Picked up the sandapper used in the first step I already talked about. I also picked up a few different masking tape widths.

Surprisingly, my next stop was actually Michaels, the craft store. Now usually, the only time you would find me in there is if I am trying to score points with the wife for something and allow her to drag me in there to spend money on stuff for her. I ended up buying:

- Artist tape. Plenty of narrow widths available. This stuff adheres well to metal, does GREAT at tight curves if you take your time, and seals a little better in my opinion than the cheap off the shelf stuff at Lowes. So the "red stuff" you see on top in my tape pile, is actually "artist tape". Its only a couple bucks a roll.

- Clay. I use very brightly colored modelling clay. I needed 2 blocks of it. I used a color called "very orange" so its highly visible when I am going back and getting it back out of receiver post-painting. I used the clay to keep painting from getting into things that were hard to block with tape. Examples of this are the end of the barrel, the screw hole in the receiver tang, the bolt entry of the rear of the receiver itself, etc.

- Fake plants. Michaels has a whole bunch of girly roses and crap made of all kinds of crazy stuff, but they also have a bunch of fake regular foliage. I am looking for stems, branches, and leaves. It's ok if it has stupid feathers and crap in there, I can clip those out. So I ended up buying a few different kinds that are the kinds of shapes I want.

- Better spray paint. I did krylon and some high-temp enamel the first time. I was not very happy with it. It's pretty darn hard to find good flats. The color selection in flats is not very impressive by any means, and its annoying to work with, horrible fumes, etc. There are actually intended-for-artist spray paints that have a much better palette of colors, plenty of flat choices, AND because they are INTENDED to be used indoors by an artist, they are low fume! Which meant being able to (reasonably safely) do this all in my basement instead of waiting for decent weather outside. The downside? Not cheap. Like $11 a can. Oh well. $40 on spray paint for a DIY job that I like and feel good about is worth it to me (and still WAY cheaper than duracoat, cerakote elsewhere, right).

Incidentally there are LOTS of different greens and green/yellows and olive colors, I just didn't use them for my project, so if you are considering this, and can handle the sticker shock, don't let my color choices turn you off to this brand.

AND. When the woman who unlocked the case asked me what my project and I got to tell her painting a gun, her reaction was priceless. You would have thought I told her I was going to use these paints to start sacrificing sacred religious relics in front of her or something.

 

[Oddball Six]

The next step was to prep the work area. I used my basement gym. Its ~ 300 sq ft, plenty of hard surface to lay things out on. I used cheap plastic floor covers from lowes to get maximum coverage on the cheap. A couple bucks, and I actually OVER covered everything. Spray paint goes way further than I think it would. Learned that one the hard way last time, the walls of my garage can still attest to that with some over-spray.

SPEND TIME TAPING AND CLAYING YOUR RIFLE!

A lot of the quality of the final outcome will come from how much time you spent making sure paint doesnt get where it's not supposed to. Also make sure that surfaces that matter for how they apply surface-to-surface do not get covered. As an example, I very carefully taped the entire inside of the XLR stock and the magazine channel to ensure no paint got in there, but that I had full coverage of the sides of the XLR.

I wanted the ejection port of the reciever to get some paint, but no paint to get into the bolt throw or on the anti-bind rail, etc. The results turned out very well. I may add some pictures to lend some details to how that worked out later.

I started with a base coat of medium brown and then "eyeballed" slashes of the gray and darker brown contrast colors. The key was to lay down a contrasting pattern that could then be covered with the lighter "field dominant" color of autumn weeds and drying sage from the plains for the gray and brown to "show through" with.

This 3 color pattern ends up being the "under pattern" for the much lighter primary color that gets applied last.

In order to get there and get the true final patterning to come out, I used wire cutters to remove the crap feathers and what not from the fake plants.

I then cut out branches and different length segments of the large originally purchased plant pieces so that I had a lot of organic branch shapes, some grass shapes, and branch splits, etc to lay over the various rifle parts.

Once the parts were more or less randomly covered, I made sure that the next step was looking for more-or-less alignment of the "plants" in a uniform way. The DIY camo only has to be good enough to keep the coyote from running at 100 yards but I want to make sure that I am good with my work and not re-doing it next year because I am unsatisfied with my attention to detail. It's as much about me being happy with the out come as it was about the real value of what the camo was actually going to be doing for me.

 

[Oddball Six]

If you have done things right by the time you get to this step, you should be able to let the parts sit for just 30-60 minutes or so with this brand of paint (one of the other nice bennies of the more expensive stuff) and then remove the fake foliage to see how things went. Don't like it? You can always sand and respray for some of the larger parts. Not necessarily something you want to be doing with something like the optic, but as it turned out, I liked where the "big parts" were at this stage.

All that was left was to finish all the parts, allow sufficient time for drying and then to do re-assembly.

All-in-all the only thing I am not happy about this time around were just a few things

1) Bolt handle is not as easy as it seems. The "outside" or "top" of the handle looks good, but the forward surface of the paint did not turn out as well as I would have liked, I think I handled it too early, and got some overspray going as well which kept it wet longer than I wanted. Needed to go with lighter coats to cover such a small piece of the bolt.

2) Even with how careful I was on the taping and using clay and what-not, I still managed to forget to tape the illumination knob on my viper scope. I was able to gently apply very fine grit sandpaper when the paint was dry-to-touch but not fully cured to carefully and gently remove the paint without scoring the numbering or the black paint of the scope knob itself.

3) Looking at the output, the gray comes through but it more "softens" the other colors than doing anything on its own. Were I to do this again, I might replace gray with a green blend of some kind. In a very tan field for this area, green can be a strong color that draws the eye, so its a crap shoot how that turns out as well, but looking at this, the overall paint job works well, just I don't feel the gray is doing anything at all for building the contrast.


And, general safety reminder, make sure you cleared out your bore if you used any clay, tape, etc, to "plug it" at the start! A cleaning brush and a few rags down the barrel aren't going to go awry.

 

[JBNj]

Nice write up and nice rifle you have there. Possible for some pics from the side view to see the "whole" camouflage detail?

 

[Oddball Six]

At JBNj's request, adding side pictures:

 

[JBNj]

I like how that came out. That would really well for me for where ill be hunting deer later in the year. Pa woods with snow.

 

[Moonlighter1]

Awesome write up and great work for sure. Just curious, how hard was it to get the clay out? I have an XLR also and am about to do the same thing, but I'm afraid that there is going to be tiny bits of clay that are going to get stuck in places you really don't want and are just going to be impossible to get out. Also, did you tape your scope up at all to prevent the glass from getting painted, or just trust the lens caps to do the trick? Thanks again.

 

[308Gunner]

Hell of a Job

 

[Oddball Six]

Just curious, how hard was it to get the clay out? Thanks again.

I went to sportsmans warehouse and bought a set of plastic dental-pick looking things. They were blue, made of a mediocre plastic. The clay used to plug the ejection port was actually the hardest to remove because it got into some odd places (including a small piece that got forward into the lug space at the front of the receiver that was a bit difficult to remove. I *strongly* recommend using some bright ridiculous color that will be easy to see even in the poor lighting of looking in the receiver. I used a blaze orange kind of color. Something like that or a nearly-florescent pink or yellow. Something that screams "im not part of the gun, scrape me out".

You need something like these picks that can be inserted in, rotated around, scrape a good bit without harming the surfaces in the least.

If I did this again, I would look for picks like this made of a harder plastic. One thing about modelling clay, it's excellent for the purpose: adheres well, doesn't dry out over a week, and its pretty "stiff" once you put it somewhere. But the flipside of that is that its pretty stubborn to remove if you get a little glob stuck in a place like the cavity underneath the anti-bind rail from the rail to the "bottom" of the lug runway. The ones I have, the plastic bent a little bit trying to scrape it out. I ended up having to find one that was bent at a 90 degree angle with a little spade shape on the end as the only one that wouldn't bend and was able to remove the clay.

Also, did you tape your scope up at all to prevent the glass from getting painted, or just trust the lens caps to do the trick?

I actually did not tape the scope, and trusted the lens cap, the result of which is that I have a couple tiny flecks of essentially paint dust, not really paint, that I had to remove after the fact and then clean the lens really well. I tried taping a few different ways inside the scope. I ended up just going with the caps, but my working theory if I was going to tape the scope was to tape a "wall" inside the sunshade and then put the sunshade on after it was taped, then put the scope cap on that. Just an idea to consider if you decide you want to do that.

And one question not asked but I will throw out anyway: TAKE YOUR TIME!

The places where I don't like where I ended up are invariably because I was not as careful or as slow as I could have been. I touched up the forward area of the bolt knob and handle. And then smeared it. You cant see it in the picture but it's because I did not wait long enough. Last time I painted the rifle, it was a bit of a hack job. This time I took my time at virtually every step. Taped well, put the money and time into better materials and the clay. And I have to say I like where it ended up MUCH better. Painting well is a few days of light work. Take your time on it, enjoy the hell out of the time you spent for a few years. Whats an extra hour in taping and claying if you have zero regrets for a few years after?

One other lesson learned? Get the artist tape and a craft knife. The hardest taping part was the scope knobs. The smallest crinkle in the tape let in a little bit of paint dribble, which I then had to VERY carefully remove after the fact with super-fine sandpaper, gently. It took probably 5x the effort to carefully sand away the unwanted dribble than it would have re-doing the tape after finding a crinkle.

 

[Moonlighter1]

Awesome thanks man, that's some solid advice for sure. I think I'm going to give it a try, but I'm definitely going to try it on an old pellet gun and an old .22 to see what I end up with before I go spraying my more expensive boom sticks. Thanks again dude!