Catalyzing your paint. Do's and Dont's!

This Christy Idaho Painter here on PaintLife TV today is a video on how to catalyze your paints. I'm going to be working on some cabinets, not right here. This is a 1950s remodel that we're doing. This is the bedroom. We're working in some cabinets on the other two units over here. We're going to be using Centerian coatings products and I use a product called their 2800 series product and we always catalyze that product when we're using it. I wouldn't say always but most of the time. If you've never catalyzed that paint before, this video I'm going to show you how simple and easy it is to catalyze it. There's a lot of benefits to catalyzing your paint. So if you want to see and hear about why you should catalyze, stay tuned for this video. All right so now we're going to get on with catalyzing our paint. There's two options from Centerian coatings when it comes to 2800 series. You can cross-link it or you can catalyze it. If you choose to cross-link it, cross-linking adds chemical resistance and it adds water resistance. We typically never cross-link our paint. We always harden it or catalyze it. Catalyzing it adds the chemical resistance and water resistance but it adds other benefits and one of them it makes the product bond a lot better and that's one of the things I really like. It also makes it more durable. It makes it more scratch resistant, more resistance and chip resistant and those are very important when it comes to cabinets or any type of high traffic area that you're going to be guaranteeing for a long time. We guarantee our products in our cabinet paints over five years. So you want to have something you really can trust in catalyzing is going to make your paint that much more durable and it's going to just make you a lot more confident with your product. So we're going to get on with catalyzing it and we're going to show you what it looks like and how easy it actually is to catalyze your paint. So prior to getting on with the catalyzing, one of the things I do with Centering 2800 series paints is I typically always thicken it with a tablespoon of their thickener and the thickener just gives the paint more body and makes it thicker and when you're spraying and hanging it gives the ability for it to hang a lot better and less likely to run with a thickener added to it. And there's no real science to it. It's just a little tablespoon I just take and dip this in the thickener and just let it run off this spoon until about a tablespoon is dumped in there. Then I'm going to stir it up, let it set for a half hour and then I'm going to get on to the catalyzing. You don't need to thicken it. It's just my preference. I just like the body it actually gives to the paint when you're spraying flat or hanging. It'll give you more milk thickness too. So it's just something I do and you can test it out and see whether you like adding the thickener to your paint and whether you get good results with it. All right, so I'm getting ready to do the catalyzing process and you can catalyze Centering and coding. You can not catalyze it or you can catalyze it all the way up to 15%. You know, why would you not catalyze it? Because you really want to add that durability, the hardness, the bonding capability, that really soft buttery like feel, chip resistance, chemical resistance. You want to add that to the paint. The catalyst is money. So it does cost money. It's not cheap. So that's one of the drawbacks to it. So the more you catalyze it, the more money it's going to cost. You can catalyze it up to 15%. Whenever I'm doing furniture or whenever I'm doing kitchen cabinets, I always catalyze it at 15%. Now you'll give it take a half an ounce or something. You don't have to be exactly precise. It called I'm catalyzing the furniture at 8%. And it came out to 5.1. So five ounces will work. It's so give or take right in there. I've got my 64 ounce measuring cup. And I just buy these these standard measuring cups that have ounces on them. There's a lot of other crazy things on ratios and stuff. I don't pay attention to any of that. It's just the side right here that measures ounces. So this measured out 64 ounces did the calculation 8%. It comes up to 5% catalyst. Now I'm going to pour my catalyst in there. Here's centering catalyst. Don't be fooled by this. This is one that got paint spilled all over it. It's the exact same thing just using this first when it was shipped. One of the gallons of paint actually opened up and got all over it. So I'm just going to measure out on here five ounces. Now when you dump in your catalyst, this is extremely important. You don't want to just dump it in right there. If you just dump it in, what's going to happen is you're going to flash harden this stuff. It's going to make it get hard super fast. You want to just slowly stir it in. So I'm going to measure off my ounces, five ounces. So pretty close to five. Now I'm just going to use a stir stick. I'm going to start to slowly stir in my catalyst. I do not want to dump it in fast super fast. I'm just going to slowly stir it in. The catalyst doesn't you don't have to have a sweat time to it like some epoxy, some two part coatings. You have to let it sweat, which means you got to let it set for a certain period of time and activate it. There is no sweat time on this product. As soon as I mix it, I'm ready to go to start spraying it. I do have a pot life. You need to pay attention to that pot life because you could ruin your sprayer. If you don't clean it out, you'll be for it hardens because it will harden inside your sprayer. So my pot life is going to be five hours. Once I'm done catalyzing it, stirring it in, I'm going to have Luke mark down our time that we catalyze it and our time we need to clean. That's very important to pay attention to. It's good if you have a phone just a set in the alarm about 30 minutes before, you know, it's time to clean it up. So it's a reminder that the pot life will change according to the conditions room conditions or outside conditions. If it's wherever you're spraying it's really hot. It's going to decrease your pot life. So if it's 95 degrees here inside where I'm at, it's probably going to decrease it down to about four and a half hours. So pay attention to that. So I've got my product mixed up going to note my time. What time is it? So it's 11.30 at five hours to that, you know, 70 degrees inside here. So we got 11.30 and then what's our clean time, Luke? 4.30 we need to make sure we clean up. We're just going to be doing one piece of furniture with this black. So it's going to be pretty fast. We're going to spray several coats on that. So I'm going to log that down. We did add to my product. I typically, when I'm doing dark, deep base colors, vibrant colors are going to be adding a thickener to the paint. I already added the thickener. The thickener just thickens the paint. Exactly what it says. I've gives it more body and you can spray heavier mill thickness. The paint will hang a little bit better. When you add a thickener, I always add about a tablespoon of thickener to the product and that's a Centurion product. CW9002, especially with a black that's really thin, a thickener is going to help it out. I've got a couple other colors that are kind of deep colors that are the same thing. I added a thickener to the kind of the mustard yellow that we're going to be doing in one of the other colors. So we're ready to go. Ready to load this thing up and start spraying. So there you have it. Some tips and tricks catalyzing your paint or just showing you the process of how easy it is to catalyze your paint. Now I would highly recommend any time you're doing cabinets, you're doing vanities, you're doing entertainment centers that you do catalyze it once again. It just gives you that confidence and once you get in one of the big benefits that I really like, it gives that really soft buttery feel that makes it feel like a factory finish. It's absolutely amazing and I typically am always using Centurion coatings 2800 series 2k poly, best 2k poly that I've ever used. If you want to see more of our videos that are coming out about seven years like this, don't forget hit this subscribe button, hit the notification bell, kind of weird. You got to hit the notification bell or the subscribe button really means nothing. And all it does is it just allows YouTube to send you an email as a reminder every time I come out with a new video. Simple, free, easy to do. It's just a simple way to help support us making all these videos out there. If you got any questions or comments, leave it down in the comments section below. We try to answer them. We try to look at them in a timely manner. And once again, I learn from you just like you learn from us right here on PaintLife TV. We'll see you next time for another cabinet video. Hit the subscribe, out.