Is anyone planning on spray painting their robot for Worlds? If so what paint would you recommend?
this paint should work well on the vex metal.
hope this helps!
Has your team been using this? (Not a lot of color options :/)
But I would be more interested in blue’s and green’s
We just found some spraypaint at lowes. We got a Black Metal Car spraypaint, then the only bright green spraypaint they had was for signs.
Here is our older bot all painted: http://team323z.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/0/6/10062475/_4385255_orig.jpg
Did you take each painted part off and then paint it or did you just use paper or something so that it would only get that spot?
We knew where the pieces would go, so before we stuck them on we painted them. CAD is helpful here 
We actually used Krylon over a primed surface with great results. You need to scrub the metal in a dish soap and dry it well first to prevent getting some fisheye in the paint. Even after scrubbing it well we had a few issues until we used primer. Cheap $1.00 WalMart primer is fine so don’t spend money you don’t need to there.
We painted black and hammer tone green, and after 5 level 4-5 events we only noticed a few scratches from shoving matches, so chipping is not an issue.
We are leaving our robot for Worlds bare metal since it’s only going to one event before it gets torn back down, but next seasons will be painted or anodized.
you dont need super high quality paint. just prep the surface and spray many light coats then put a few coats of clear coat.
The washing is a necessity and self etching primer will also help keep the paint from chipping off. Lightly sanding the parts will also help the paint to stick and not chip. As stated before many light coats. You dont need the best paint ever as stated above.
Ok well i guess we won’t bother anodizing it then. Using paper behind it works right? (I really don’t want to take it apart, especially since we’re completely done.
We just finished painting our robot. Took it apart on Monday, painted every piece Tuesday and Wednesday, reassembled Thursday and Friday. Taking the robot apart seemed easier to us than painting it assembled. And it gave us an easier way to switch the entire thing with Nylocks than taking off individual screws.
It’s not too bad to do it that way. As for painting it assembled, I have no recommendations. It seems like a lot more work.
disassembly is definitely the preferred route, as if you screw up and paint something else it creates a LOT of friction, (speaking from personal experiance)
Yeah we ended up just rebuilding. It only took 1.5 days
Could we see a picture of your painted robot?
In 24-36 hours, yes. We’re posting a reveal in a bit.