Progress on the Bog Garden

Work on the bog garden tub has been slow. After spending several days with Aircraft Remover and not getting all the paint off, I decided to just wire brush the loose paint off and call it good -- this is a garden bog tub, not a centerpiece of the best bathroom in the house.

First Noel helped me get the feet off (we applied Liquid Wrench liberally then let it do its thing for a few days).

Then I got out the wire brush attachment for the drill and spent several more days -- one battery charge at a time -- wire brushing the whole tub to remove rust and as much loose paint as possible.

The next step was to seal the rust and prime the metal with Adcoat Rust Converter and Primer. I will say that this stuff should not sit around as long as I had it sitting around, and I ended up putting four coats of it on because it was not fresh. So keep that in mind if you decide to use it. It is remarkable stuff, though, and once I had enough of it on the metal was about as good as you could expect it to be. I will definitely use it again should I ever do a similar project. Fresh, next time.

Once the primer had a chance to dry (24 hours minimum, so I gave it a couple days), I got some paint and put a coat on.

There are not a ton of options in metal paints, so I picked Rustoleum "Hammered" paint which is supposed to hide a lot of defects. My review of this paint is that it is a royal pain to put on any vertical surface, and is doesn't hide surface defects so much as highlight them. But I got a coat on and from a distance it doesn't look bad.

The can suggests two coats, and I still need to wire brush, prime, and paint the feet, so there's still more work to go before I even start plumbing this thing, but that's where we are.

posted by ayse on 06/22/20