DuraCoat rifle paint

Are you brave enough to paint your rifle? DuraCoat is a great option:

As I mention in my review of the Remington 700 5R, one of my main hesitations for buying the rifle was that it is only available in stainless. Don't get me wrong, the stainless looks great, but I wanted matte black. I was planning on following the advice of many shooters out there and simply painting the rifle with Krylon and using acetone to wipe it back off if I changed my mind. The more I thought about it though, the more I wanted something more permanant. The 5R is a match rifle, and I would be using lots of fairly abrasive chemicals on a regular basis. I didn't want the paint around the muzzle to be eaten away every time I cleaned up after a trip to the range...

So I tried Krylon (and Duplicolor, and Rustoleum, and every other matte black paint I could find at the hardware store) on test scraps of steel. I even tried Brownell's bake on enamel. None of them worked well enough. Even the "high heat" ceramic paints that state they are highly resistant to chemicals. Most would break down and leave black stains on a rag soaked in a little bit of powder solvent. Surprisingly, the real strong ammonia copper solvents didn't seem to bother the paint as much.

The trouble with Brownell's wasn't as much its chemical resistance, but that if the surface wasn't absolutely immaculately prepared, the paint would crack in the baking process and flake off. I decided to invest in DuraCoat.

The first thing I'll mention about DuraCoat is there are a million colors to choose from. I was painting a stainless rifle, and I chose a color called "Stealth Gray". It's hard to choose from the color swatches on the website, and the color I picked ended up a bluish tint of gray - not what I was hoping for. Thankfully, I had ordered the starter kit, and all I needed was one small jar of new paint, which was cheap. I went with a much safer "Matte Black".

Backing up though, the DuraCoat instructions are solid, and gave great information on how to prep the rifle. Sandblasting is ideal, I had to scuff up my rifle by hand - a gut check, let me tell you! I used 100 grit wet/dry sandpaper and acetone to get the job done.

I then took detailed up-close pictures of the trigger before removing it from the action (a life saver for putting small parts back together), taped off the trigger housing, as well as the face of the bolt. I also put a foam earplug in the crown of the rifle, and some paper towels in the chamber.

My plan was to paint as many of the internal parts as I could - the internal box magazine and spring, the stock screws, the bolt, trigger, etc. I was also going to lightly coat the entire stock, as I had treated the palm grip and forend in Herculiner using leftover paint from refinishing my truck bed. The 4 ounce jar of flat black, was just enough to cover all of those.

I followed the DuraCoat instructions as best I could - I did use my air compressor instead of the small jar of compressed air that came with the starter kit though. Here are a couple mistakes I made that you can easily learn from:

First, my original starter kit had a bad airbrush. the nozzle would not open correctly, and I had to keep shaking the jar to get paint to flow. Bad idea. Shaking the jar would initiate the flow, but a couple times too much was shaken out, and I got a bad drip on the rifle that needed to be sanded later. I called DuraCoat and they immediatey sent a replacement airbrush.

Second, I put too much paint on the bolt. Too many coats resulted in too tight a fit, that I had to fix later with sandpaper and bore paste. Go easy on the bolt.

Finally, I was using a hairdryer in between coats to make sure the paint was setting and wouldn't run. On my last pass, I was kind of "misting" the rifle to get out any unevenness, and I think the paint was drying a bit in the air before contact. The result was a finish that was a bit gritty. As I was using matte black, this was easily fixed later by buffing the rifle with 1000 grit sandpaper. I had plenty of coats, so this slight sanding was no problem at all, and really smoothed it out.

One other thing though - DuraCoat states that it will dry enough to use in about 48 hours, but will not be fully cured for 6 weeks. When I spoke to them, they advised to really leave it alone for as much of that 6 weeks as you can - that's a long time!

That said, the rifle has been great. There have been no dings, chips, or flaking, and the paint is totally resistant to any cleaning solvents I have used so far. If you want a really professional look in a do-it-yourself package, DuraCoat is a great option.