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Hurrah for finding another brand of black lacquer at the auto parts store. It’s Duplicolor and has the fan nozzle. With my little MDF absorption trauma fresh in my mind I decided it’d be best to prime the side table, so I also got the ’sandable primer’ also made by Duplicolor, since it’s also lacquer based I figured it would work okay.

Well, the primer seems nice, no big issues with application. I then went onto spraying the lacquer, argh!

The primer is absolutely ineffective at sealing the MDF, so back to the glue-sizing method, This time mixing it 1:1 with water. I also noticed, to my horror, that the can of black lacquer is seemingly defective. I had lacquer all over my finger and before I knew it, anytime I’d go to re-shake the can I’d be flinging droplets all around! I really hope this is an isolated defective can and that the other can of black lacquer doesn’t exhibit this problem. I pretty much wasted the can, not that it was useful anyway — but the problem is that I basically need to start over, thanks to gigantic droplets of the lacquer on the horizontal surfaces of the side table.

I’m hoping I can very lightly sand those out, but the bottom surface is absolutely coated with excess, with very little I could do to prevent it, other than not spraying. I’m fantastically annoyed at this point, enough to go ahead and probably drop whatever amount of money is necessary for a proper HVLP setup, defective spray nozzles ruining hours of work is not something I have any tolerance for.

Addendum: The spurting all over the place of the lacquer from the can was not an isolated occurance, because after about a minute it started happening again. Of course, it happened as I was spraying the top surface! Then I made a really stupid mistake of wiping the lacquer droplets off, HAHA… it wiped all the way through the primer I’d put on. Well, folks, it’s true that lacquer chemically ‘melts’ into all other lacquer coatings — I can’t say layers, since there is only one layer, due to the chemical fusing that happens.

Deft to the rescue, again. I popped off the total piece of shit Duplicolor spray nozzle that was causing the leaking, spurting, and destruction of my table’s finish and popped on one of the Deft spray nozzles that I’d been saving for just such an instance. There is a massive difference in spray quality using the Deft nozzle! The spray is finer, and, guess what? It isn’t spurting lacquer all over the place anymore! I’d really like to blame this on me, but I’m shaking the can enough, even the 10 seconds every minute as recommended — which is when lacquer splatters everywhere of course, and I’m also clearing out the nozzle by holding it upside down on a regular basis.

Of course, I have three not so little holes (the size of a dime) in the lacquered top, I also have two big droplets that I hadn’t wiped off. I need to fill the holes — which should be entertainingly horrible, and then sand down everything around it… AGAIN!