Painting Molded in Windows Fast
You just bought a new kit structure and unfortunately, all of the windows are molded in place with the wall sections! What do you do now?
The Dilemma
Those of you who haven’t built a DPM or other manufacturer kit that has molded or cast in place windows don’t realize the pain that comes with dealing with them. Separately molded windows are simple to deal with because you can easily paint them whatever color you would like and snap or glue them in place when dry. With the molded in windows you need to figure out a way to paint them that suits you best.
One of a few options with painting them is by spraying the entire wall section the color you want and then going back and brushing the window frame color in. This method can be very time consuming and if your painting skills are not the best, you could over paint onto the brick or siding. Then you run into the issue of having to touch up the wall color. If you sprayed the walls then you can’t simply re-spray the area because you will over spray onto the window frame color and then you are back to square one. You can touch up the sprayed on walls by brush, but then the paint goes on darker and it is obvious what was done.
Another method is to paint the entire wall section the color of the window frames, then come back and brush in the wall color. Problems with this are similar to the method mentioned above and by brushing the paint onto the walls, you won’t get as good as a coat if you would have sprayed it (this can be argued). Up till now I would go back and forth between the two methods and usually settled with the first.
If you wanted to spend the time you could do the second method by spraying the walls the color of the windows, then mask them off with tape. This works but again is VERY time consuming and bleeding is a possibility. Not something you want to happen if you spent hours getting masking tape to fit in each window. I spent two days masking off the windows on my Hudson Life Building, only to come back and spend another two hours touching up the bleeds.
The Solution
For the review of the Lunde Studios, Schwitters Dept. Store, I was going to need to mask or hand paint 107 window frames. Not wanting to waste time I didn’t have, I spent a few minutes trying to develop a solution to my dilemma. This is the crazy idea I came up with that worked so good for me, that I will never go back to the other “old fashioned” ways again.
note: I will refer to painting as spraying, because it is my preferred method (airbrush or can). I have not tried this by brushing, but I believe with a few minor changes, it will work as well.
Step 1
Spray the entire wall section the color of what you want the window frame to be. Allow to dry sufficiently. If you have a wall section, such as my example, that will have differing colored windows and walls, keep the sections separate until finished painting.
Step 2
Measure the window openings exactly (use calipers if you have them). Take some .005″ sheet styrene, cut it into strips that is equal to the window opening width. Cut the strip to the height of the opening. I recommend using a Northwest Short Line Chopper to do this step so you can reproduce many of the same “Masking Tiles” exactly and quickly.
Why use .005″ styrene you ask? Tape is difficult to work with and you cant mass produce it like you can with the styrene on a Chopper. You could cut paper quickly like the styrene, but paper is going to absorb the paint and then bleed onto the masked off areas. The .005″ styrene is paper thin, stable and reusable. The paint just gathers on the surface and doesn’t wick underneath and bleed as easy as other materials would.
Step 3
Pop in the Masking Tiles with a hobby knife into the window openings, repeat as much as necessary. You are now ready to spray.
Don't force the tiles in, gently work them in. If they wont go in, trim the tile to fit.
All tiles are in. Took about 20 min. to mask 60 windows.
Painting
When you spray the wall, care needs to be taken. If a Masking Tile is a little loose then the air flow from the airbrush or spray can catch them and send them flying. Spraying from a good distance and no fast motions seem to remedy this. Making the opposite site of the Masking Tile a little tacky may help, however I have not tried this yet.
To lower risk of bleeding, spray even and light coats (I had one coat go on heavy and had very slim to no bleeding).
Because the Masking Tiles are just sitting in the openings, you need to keep the paint surface level. Because of this, if you have a assembled structure, you will only be able to paint one surface at a time. You can reuse the Masking Tiles on the other faces and be sure to cover the other faces from over spray. When done just pop the tiles out from the inside of the wall.
Just after painting, no touch up has been done.
Conclusion
While this method wont work in every situation and some of you may not like it. That is fine, but it has me sold, if I would have done this my usual way, it would have taken ten plus hours and would have looked okay. I feel I cut that down by 90% or more and the results are near perfect. I welcome questions on this method and recommend trying it on a little DPM structure or something similar first, and PLEASE tell me how it worked for you, bad or good.
Masked off brick wall, Masking Tiles are being reused.
Again, no paint touch up has been done.
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