I just signed up for a TN gun owners forum and I put out there that I will do custom camo/refinishes just let me know what you want and ill let you know what ill charge. I get a responce back about doing a digital pattern. So my question is; what tips do you have for dealing with the digital patterns? Any methods that would get the job accomplished easier? How have your experiences with the pattern been?

id really like to know what a decent digi job would cost. i think that wolf guy that used to poke around here told me like 1k lol i almost puked.

Foxtrot would be the guy to talk to, he has done several firearms up in the digital camo, they turned out great.

yea if someone told me that a digital pattern would cost 1k i would laugh in their face. I'm only looking for 350 for doing multi-cam tac rifles, and the only reason i am charging that much is because I hand cut all the masks, there are 4 total masks. taping alone is an 8 hour total process. about 2 hours of spray time for the browns and greens which are 3 layers, an hour each for the dark brown and white. thats 16 hours of spray and tape time, not to mention the cleaning, degreasing, media blasting, phos coating, unmaskingand equipment setup. I'd probably charge about the same aroudn 300-350 for a digital pattern on a tac rifle. and again the only reason why would be the amount of time spent taping.

My price tag on digital is $400 per rifle and $300 for pistols. I've got three of them on coming in too.

IP,

Can't wait to see my Moss dressed up like this:














I'm getting anxious!

Gunrunner: if you want realistic digital, you can't cut it by hand - probably 40,000 line cuts, it would literally end up taking you over a hundred hours just to cut masks. How soon would you do the job? I can cut you a few square feet of our masks on our cutter if your interested. Never had time to clean up the vectors so if its soon, there would be quite a bit of waste, but still completely usable. If it's later we may get to it in time where almost every square inch would be usable. I never got my new rolls of material in for some reason, so it might be a little over a week before I have enough on hand to cut with. In my experience, it takes five-seven square feet of digital masking in order to do one rifle. It's ridiculous (and also why it would take you literally forever to cut it by hand). If you guys have any questions on the 'how' the actual process works feel free to ask. You can estimate an absolute minimum of four hours of masking time (to apply them) per each layer of color, per rifle.

For this:

Damn Fox! That is sick!

I love the look of both of those.

Fox, First off those look amazing. I would be very interested in getting a strip of masking from you, it'd definantly be a time saver and I know you are going to be able to provide better masking materials than I'd find on lauerweaponry or bulldogarms (I've gotten one mask from bulldogarms, it's still sitting in the tube, it's crap). It wouldn't be for a little while, meaning between end of April and end of May. Unfortunantly a little trip out of country is going to eat up my summer and prevent me from getting to into Duracoating inbetween the trips to Iraq. I hope to get a couple projects done though. I guess my other question would be should I get an actual strip of camo that I'm trying to replicate? Do I start dark to light or light to dark or does it matter?

All the digital patterns inevitably come from the same 'mask'. CADPAT is MARPAT and ACU is the same essentially. I never have got too OCD to try to replicate the individual nuances/slight differences in pattern generation between them because there almost isn't any to speak of. When it comes down to it, whatever you put down (as long as its detailed enough) will look 'right'. Generally speaking, if you are doing something like an AR (dark) the first layer is the darkest color, solid. From there, you put on your first layer of masks. I start with big ones and then fill in the gaps, remembering that this is 'one color' and should be about 1/4-1/3 coverage with 3 color.. 1/4 to 1/5 coverage with 4 color. Place a few small 'dots' here and there to get the fine detail in other colors. Once you have the masks layed, spray your next darkest layer. Let it sit, and apply the next layer of masks. Don't try to fill in gaps with masking, in other words, pretend your first layer of masking doesn't exist - this is easy being you sprayed it over. This time aim for maybe 1/3-2/5 masking coverage with 3 color, 1/4-1/3 coverage with 3 color. Do the same, start by spacing out some big masks, then fill in the gaps by placing progressively smaller ones, and add quite a few more 'dots'. Make sure you place masks as if the old masks do not exist. You need them to overlap randomly for it to look correct. Remember to place a few more small dots this time. Spray, let sit, and then repeat for the next layer(s). Each layer you add you want to aim for more total coverage of the rifle., as a lot of your masks are now over other masks you have to overcompensate to make your distribution even. Your very last layer of masking should probably have more than half the rifle covered in fresh masking material, and in some places you might have masks 3-4 layers deep. This is a good thing. Your very last layer of masking, make sure you place a lot of the little (smallest rectangles) dots around, as this layer won't have any stencils that will spray through, the little dots will preserve some of the finer detail in your existing colors. (in other words, if your very last color is tan, place lots of the little dots so you have for instance, ACU grey and ACU grey-green tiny rectangles inside the tan, otherwise it will be the only color missing these tiny details within it)

PM me an address and I'll get some to you as soon as we can, should have it before then no problem.

Oh and basically - go with the base color of the rifle. If it's dark, go dark-light. If its light, go light-dark with some exceptions (spraying pink or white over black isn't easy!). Only go dark-light if there isn't a vast difference of brightness in your colors. Most digital jobs there isn't. Otherwise, spray your lightest whenever you have a huge brightness difference and then your darkest after.

Lastly, as I'm sure your aware, the 'rules' of digital is simple: Keep it on a grid, perpendiculars and parallels. No line should end up on diagonals compared to other lines or it will look strange. The individual masks can be diagonal - that is no problem, if the mask itself is vectored so the digital staggers into a diagonal. What I mean, is all the individual lines of each cut should be as close as possible to being on the same 'Y' and 'X' grid. No masks should be laid so the individual lines of each cut are at odd angles inside that grid.

I don't know if you guys run into this same pattern or is it was just because with the multi-cam i was spraying 3 colors per mask but inbetween each mask I was waiting until it was tac-dry and removing the mask to run my finger over the lines to 'smooth' them. I'm guessing with a digital pattern you don't have to worry about this as much since it's only one layer of paint at a time? pm will be sent here shortly.

Ya, I've never had any serious problems with edging. I generally let it sit overnight (mask in the day, spray at night, back at it in the morning) and have never had any issues with rough edges - even in places where the duracoat is built up 3 colors deep along an edge (digital). It's a dry climate here though and I'm letting them sit longer, and my masks are pretty thick so I don't know if that affects anything. IP has had some problems with bad edging in the past so I seem to be the odd duck out - don't know why, for sure.