The Story of Paint
Paint has been a hassle with this track, not because of anything other than the supply chain seems to be in shambles. We ordered primer and silver paint+activator from a vendor online, the paint color we chose was called silver gray, but as you can see in the light colored section of the straight shown in the photo below it was a very light gray. I’ve seen and raced on many light colored tracks and the one thing they all have in common is they always look dirty. The online vendor back ordered the paint so we cancelled that order and for $100 more we picked it up locally (mind you from a company that owns the original online vendor that back ordered the paint). We prepped, sanded, cleaned, and primed the surface, sanding down to 400 grit between coats. This went smoothly and all was well until we put the first coat of paint on. Ugh, it was way too light. So back to ordering roulette, we again ordered a gallon of black paint+activator (its a 2-part epoxy paint we use for durability), I knew that I could mix my own custom color as I did when we refurbished the Twister back in 2016. Again, back ordered (until October), so I called them up and asked them what was missing, was it the activator or the paint? I didn’t need the activator as I was only needing the black to tint the new can of silver that I already had, so for about $20 more they sold me the paint without the activator. So it was going to be off to other projects while we wait, but luckily when Raymond and I were upstairs looking for #4 x 1/2″ wood screws to mount the clips that hold the new LED lighting for under the bridge Raymond ran across my paint stash, what was this he asked? There were 2 cans of activator. Suddenly my feeble brain kicked into gear and I asked if there were any cans of paint near where the activator was located. There were 2, a brand new can of white (damn! wrong color) and a premixed can of dark gray which was saved for touch up on the Twister if ever necessary. So now we had a premixed gallon of the exact same color we used on the twister (score one for Raymond). So we mixed it up, spending about 30 minutes on the paint which has settled over the years and laid it on (as you can see in the section of the track shown in the photo that does not have any lane striping. So the only question remains is is 5 year old paint any good? Normal paint likely would not, but this paint uses an activator, so we are in hopes that it will be OK. In fact the MSDS claims a shelf life of 4 years and it went on nice, and overnight seems to have hardened up. So fingers crossed we won’t have to redo all our work.
