Well, this has been a heck of a journey.
I went ahead and primed the interior of the front cabinet panels. Priming is easy and fun, nothing much to say about it - I've primed a lot of things before and I'm comfortable doing it with a roller brush and a foam brush.
I knew I wanted the interior of the front box painted because you'll see it when you open the coin door. I kind of regret not painting the interior parts of Mimic, so I figured I'd go ahead and paint up the inside of the back cabinet too, though it'll only show when the access hatch is off for service.
It'll help block light leaks on the buried DMD monitor. There's no good way to get a paintbrush up into the side cheeks, though, so I'm just going to do the main atrium / wind tunnel down the center.
I dry sanded the light grey primer with a couple passes of 250 and 400 grit, then rolled on a coat of gloss black latex paint, and it looked bad. That's okay, though the first coat on primer always looks bad, that's to be expected. I knocked the high spots off with another pass of sandpaper, rolled on the second coat, and that's about what most of the bookshelves I've made get - full coverage, but it could perhaps be called utilitarian.
My base layer sanding didn't do as much as I thought. But hey, I thought, I've watched Ond's video, I just need to do the process. Sand more.
So I sanded down to accidental burn through into primer, and rolled on more black paint, and sanded through it, and rolled on more, and the results were just wretched.
I mean, awful.
Awful, like, this is what I had after about 10 hours of work.
That is like five coats of paint. I'd gone through maybe ten complete sheets of sandpaper by this time, full of pilled up impacted paint bits. If anything, it looked worse than the brute force two-coats-and-done I've used in the past.
My spirits at this point were pretty low.
I found myself remembering:
You won't disappoint my friend .
... yeah.
I kept going.
By hour 18, with rigorous care dry sanding and the most careful sanding block discipline, I had something that reflected light like this:
(That's the white specular reflections of the shop lights in the high gloss valleys, and I'm maybe halfway down to meeting them with the flat matte finish left from the hours, and hours, of dry block sanding I've done.)
So at that rate, what, it should take 30 hours to hit the bottoms if I don't screw up and knock a hole to primer somewhere first? Hrgh.
I started getting experimental. Why not, this is a lot of doom and ruin anyway. I thought about Ond's video, and watching him dip his sandpaper in water to clear the dust. I grabbed the water bottle I use to dampen my soldering sponge, and hosed a dab of water right onto the middle of the panel with a shrug. Plopped the sanding block into the pool and instantaneous magic happened.
Where I was fighting stiction and pill-rolling and a nightmare of slow progress interrupted by dusting the paper and the work surface every fourth stroke... a fine slurry of silky paint sludge began to flow. The feel of the sanding block changed entirely - I could read the remaining contours in the surface from the way the pad moved, and everything started to WORK. Wet sanding this stuff is like a 10x speed multiplier. It is -amazing-. It is -magic-.
About 18 hours to get to that picture above. Add water. And then it's about 15 minutes to get to this.
Well hello there.
The rate of improvement of the surface is astounding. I think some of the slurried dust of water and latex paint is reattaching in the bottoms of the valleys or something, because the surface improves faster under wet sanding than just knocking the tops of the peaks off seems to explain.
Another fifteen minutes, and,
I think I've learned how to do this, maybe!
I kept at it with the wet sanding, learning the feel of it. Once I got it somewhere I liked, I broke out the Novus #3 and #2 polishes, and I got this:
Not bad, for foam-rolled latex paint, hey?
Thanks, Ond. I wouldn't have believed I could do it. Now, I think I can. Water is the epiphany. Water is the answer. I still have much technique at this to develop, but I feel I can see the way now.