Introduction to Catalyzing and Thickening Paint

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…