Any experience with painting lids?

Does anyone have eny experience painting the lid of a laptop, maybe with spray paint? What prep is required, what is the best paint to use etc. ?

 

Blast the laptop lid with this. I assure you your 'puter will look unique.

 

Masking tape, and lots of it. Cover all the vents, LED's, drive bays, all the hinges, and be very meticulous Paint in a hinge will ruin it, same with a drive (especially the textured paints like above). If you do go with textured paints, make sure you put a heavy clear-coat on top of it. Your laptop will get more rubbing than most applications for that paint, so you want to make sure it doesn't come off. I'd almost suggest removing the optical drive and just covering the bay with tape as well. Paint with slow, even coats, don't let it get too heavy before letting it dry. Do multiple coats rather than putting it on thicker all at once. Tape down a sheet of newspaper (and nothing thinner/flimsier!) if you need to cover large areas, like a keyboard or the LCD. Masking tape directly on the LCD screen shouldn't hurt it as long as you take it off in less than 24 hours.

Good luck if you decide to do it Just be careful, and triple-check covering everything. Paint can get into anything, especially when it's spray paint.

 

Take the part that you want to paint OFF of the rest of the computer... much safer than trying to mask. For the lid of a Toshiba, unfortunately, in order to unhinge it, you'll have to take the whole thing apart, mobo is the only thing that will stay seated. It's a pain, but the good news is they go back together without much hassle.

 

You gonna paint it pink arent cha Jess?

 

i'm not really prepared to take the top off. i'd probably start with the top lid only and leave it there.

Anyone know what paint would be best to use (looking for something pink and shiny) and if the surface needs any prep? cheers.

 

it's really not so bad taking a laptop apart... just make sure you have a good screwdriver and a pill case to keep your screws organized.

 

I would highly advise against painting it while it is completely intact. I personally don't know if I'd do it with just spray paint, although I've heard that it works just fine. But I have the resources to do it professionally(Automotive spray guns and such).

 

You should definately take apart the laptop so that you have only the plastic part that you want painted.

Any paint that you use should be meant to be used on plastic. I would highly recommend Krylon Fusion. It actually bonds to plastic and is pretty much impossible to chip if you do it right.

You should make sure to sand down whatever you are painting to the bare plastic. If you do not do this, the paint will eventually chip.

What kind of finish are you going for?

You should also be sure to wait proper times between coats, and allow plenty of time for drying.

It is important to follow all directions on your spray can.

One last thing:
Painting a laptop takes a long time if you want to do it right. It takes a lot of patience, and you need to be able to go without your laptop for atleast a full month. You can rush the paint job, but it won't look very good at all and it will be damaged almost immediately.

On a side note, it is possible to paint a laptop properly over the course of a few days, however I would not recommend it. I haven't gotten around to posting about my new paint job(redid it) because I haven't taken pictures because the weather around here has been horrible. I managed to do mine in three and a half days, with over 60 man hours put into it. I also had to bake my parts in my parents' oven for quite some time. I would advise against baking, and you should definately just let it dry the normal way for a few weeks.

 

i doubt many people are willing to forego their laptop for so long... maybe something along the line's of the acer carbon fibre mod thread would be easier. i think that's what i would do, if i were to mod my laptop.

 

Well I doubt that many people are willing to paint their laptop. If you want to paint your laptop, do it right. And do it right the first time. I learned the hard way. I spent over a month painting my laptop just to have to start over again because I didn't do everything properly.

It is possible to bake just the plastic parts to speed up the drying process to about a week, however you risk deforming the plastic like I did. I was lucky enough that I was able to fix it and you would never have any reason to think anything ever happened to it. But I couldn't get my lcd back in the cover, and my palm rests were seriously deformed.

Anyway, I have two laptops, as you can tell by my sig, and I mainly use my laptops in school anyway, so I had no trouble going without one laptop for a month over the summer when I painted it the first time.

 

JPZ, how long did you bake the pieces for and at what temperature did you bake it? Alternatively, do you know of a good guide online that covers this? None of the ones I have found have discussed the possibility of speeding the drying process through baking.

 

I recently painted my Acer Aspire 5672's lid red. I did zero disassembly and very carefully taped up every single thing I wanted to avoid getting paint on. Did about ten very very thin coats of red Krylon Fusion paint. I let it dry for about five hours, and it was fine for use. I didn't move it for 48 hours because I didn't want to risk damaging the paint and after about a week and a half now it seems to be holding up fine and I notice no defects or wearing whatsoever yet. I apologize for the slightly poor picture..but it gives you an idea of what it looks like. It has a flattish shine to it, but it is slightly textured, not smooth. I'd imagine it would look very nice with a few layers of clear coat on it.

 

Looks to me like you put the coats on way too light, and you were too far away from the laptop. That was my mistake the first time I painted my laptop. Krylon, when sprayed properly, should appear wet and glossy. You can easily see yourself in a proper coat of black krylon. It doesn't look anywhere near as nice as it will when you paint properly and then do the finish work, but it is still quite glossy.

Also, you will notice that in the next month or two your lid will have some nice chips in it if you didn't spray the krylon on bare plastic.

Nice job masking, though!

 

I think I have found someone selling this stuff in the UK in 12oz cans. How many cans did you need?

 

Two cans tops. You can see my painted laptop in my sig. I painted the boarders of my insprion 6000, you know all the ugly white trim. I used only one can, but I didn't paint too much of the surface. Definately take the latop apart and mask the heck out of it. It is not as scary to take apart a laptop as you might think. The scaries part for me was completely taking the LCD panel out, I definately was not a fan of that.

 

I really like how that turned out. Looks real nice, more of a matte type finish. Nice work.

 

Hey check out this thead. Has some pictures of my stuff when I was painting it.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=55096

 

Nice work on the Acer. I'm really impressed with how well you masked it.

 

Wow, who could spend a whole month painting their laptop? I could never do that nor would I. I'd use catylized paints(can't get them in rattle cans) which only takes a few minutes(Maybe an hour) to dry.

 

I've got two laptops. Look in my sig. I most often use them for school, and I did the paint job over the summer.

Anyway, that's the reason that OEM laptop paint jobs always s*ck, and why they always peel or chip. If you're going to paint a laptop, you might as well do it right. And doing it right requires a very long cure time, and many, many hours of hard work. I spent over 50 hours redoing my paint job the second time.

 

It all depends on what types of paint you use. If you use catylized automotive paints then it doesn't take that long, and it is very durable... I mean thats what you paint cars with. The only draw back to that is, I highly doubt anyone on these forums have access to those types of things(Spray guns and such) which would make it so they'd have to take it to and autobody shop to get it done...

On another note, I wonder what a Rhino-Line(Line-X) laptop would be like...

 

I've done a couple notebooks in the past just you like you did here. I didn't take it apart either. I was very careful masking everything, sanded it lightly, (no need to go all the way to plasic) sprayed 1 coat of prep grey, sprayed 5 light coats of Krylon Fusion blue paint, sanded very lightly with 2,000 grit to get flaws/bubbles out, then sprayed 3 coats of clear on it. Let it dry 8 hours between each coat. Looked great and I used the heck out of the notebook. No chips or problem. No need to take it all apart and take a month doing either.
Trust me on that. Just mask VERY carefully.

I'm getting ready to paint my HP dv4000 the same way in a month or so... midnight metalic blue this time.

 

It took me just one 12 oz. can and I still had some left for my external hard drive. I was originally going to take the notebook apart, but the WLAN and bluetooth switches on the front I realized were going to break (very poor design on Acer's part) so I decided to mask very carefully and it was fine. Just really really take your time with the masking. It's been nearly a month since I painted it and with daily transportation there is very minor, barely noticable chipping on the edges due to careless insertion in my laptop bag. For the most part, the paint adhered extremely well to the plastic and it seems more scratch resistant than the paint job it came with. If you own a name brand laptop with clearly documented service manuals on how to disassemble, I would say that is the safest route to take, but my Acer would have been near impossible to disassemble and put back together in one piece.

 

Well since I do this for a living

I always take the laptop apart. I use a dremel to take out all heat melded parts so I can avoid masking.

As for paint...We only do one coat of Auto quality paint. Apply artwork if ordered. Then we clearcoat with auto quality clearcoat. We bake up to a certian temp that will not melt your plastics. Basically you get the same paint job on your laptop as you have on your car. Our entire process takes about five working days to finish. Of course our process has alot of checks and balances that a normal person does not usually think of. It also helps that our production manager used to build painting robots for the auto industry.

We only do this on plastic parts. If we have a metal part we use a completely different process that does not use paint at all. We have a patented method of fusing images to metal.

If you do not want to tear you laptop apart...feel free to pay us a visit.

JP
Laptop Design USA
www.laptopdesignusa.com

 

I'm not the painter at my company but our guy used to do motorcycles and various other things. We use auto quality paints (we can match anything) and as stated here it takes a great deal of work. We've put in 15+ hrs just on painting and more in prep and finishing.

 

another option is to buy a whole set of plactics for your llaptop (easy if you have a Dell) and do the painting on those parts then just move the compnents into the newly painted shell.

One advantage of this route is there is no down time w/o you computer. Another is you end up with a back-up shell in case anything ever breaks. I did my inspiron 8500 and the whole case was around $50-$60 on eBay...it was not bad at all. And it was fun.