More Work On Harry’s Old Garden Tools

A while back I picked up some rusty, old garden tools from my friend Harry’s House. If you’re interested you can find more information here.

Paint day

Jess was away for the week and the weather was nice so it seemed like a perfect time to get some painting done. A couple of weeks before I removed the rust using naval jelly and gave them a couple of coats of prime (Rust-oleum Rusty Metal Primer). On painting day they were sanded almost to bare metal and prepared for paint.

The handles on two of the shovels were painted metal flake blue–which I really liked. I had a couple old cans of Dupli-Color MetalCast paint, one was blue so I thought that would be a perfect fit. The MetalCast spray paint requires a base layer (metal flake ground coat), which I had a can on hand. Unfortunately, that was only enough to do some of the tools and one shovel had to be put away for another day.

I hadn’t used this paint for a while and I forgot how frustrating it is. It spatters, clogs and is just generally frustrating, that being said its amazing if you take your time. The spray paint, now 10+ years old was particularly frustrating. The blue can was only about 1/3rd full, and was depleted very quickly, but I had a partial can of purple and green which I finished up the project with.

Before Paint:

After Paint (Day 1):

Update: After Paint (Day 2):

Update: 2/15/18 – More tools completed and ready to use.

After a couple of cold rainy weeks the sun came out for a day and I quickly gathered some more tools that were ready for paint. Most of these got primed over a month ago and got all non-working areas coated with metallic paint a few weeks ago in the paint project above. Today was just finishing the working surfaces with a coat of flat black paint. I really think the floral spade came out especially nice!