Here's one way to get some pretty darn good webbing done without too much hassle. Forget the rattle can stuff - we're gonna cook up a homebrew recipe here. All you'll need is a small siphon feed paint gun to shoot the webbing mixture, and the usual painting tools.

The project for the test here is a Gottlieb Bonanza. Old school paint from 1964. Base off-white, pretty thin webbing on this particular one and really basic red/blue artwork on top. The approach I'm taking has been chosen to obtain the most accurate repro look possible with the minimum time and money.

Our cabinet was stripped, sanded & repaired, and two coats of Zinsser primer/sealer applied, sanded between coats. The base off-white is flat latex sprayed on. Another way to get a nice smooth finish would be to mix some Floetrol into the latex, then roll on with a foam roller. Very little "stipple" in the base coat that way. Now its time for the webbing:

The webbing technique is one I found on a gun restoration forum. They use paint and glue to make a paint that will spray and web. For this post, I will share with you my test shots - failures and success both.

The recipe used is three ingredients: 1) Black lacquer 2) Glue and 3) Lacquer thinner
The ratios of these ingredients matter tremendously. However - by mixing our own webbing paint we can alter the ingredients and achieve any kind of result we want.

Now the details: for paint, I'm using Duplicolor Black Lacquer:
DupliColor Black lacquer

I managed to find a quart of it at my local auto parts store. (FYI - I did attempt to make a webbing mixture with oil based enamel, and glue but nothing worked. The only paint I find that works is lacquer)

The glue used for this mixture is called "Beacon Multi-Grip", available at WalMart:
MultiGrip (resized).jpg

Multi-Grip is a very high strength, clear, medium bodied, fast curing, bodied solvent-type acrylic cement. Its similar but a little thinner than something like Weld-On 16, but I believe Weld-On 16 would also work (disclaimer: I haven't tested W-16 yet)

And finally, for spraying the webbing I opted to use a standard siphon feed touch-up paint gun. The gun I use is very similar to the one Harbor Freight sells (HF item item number 66871):
HF paint gun (resized).jpg

Time to go do some test shoots! For each shoot I will show you the recipe ratios, the gun and air settings and a picture of the results. Note that as I go from one shoot to the next, only one variable (mixture %, needle setting or air pressure) will be changed. That way we can see how making changes to each variable affects the outcome. So keep track of what's being tweaked between shoots and then compare results to get a feel for how things go:

SHOOT 1: 80% paint / 20% glue / 40 psi / 2 turns open on the needle
Shoot 1 (resized).jpg

SHOOT 2: 66% paint / 33% glue / 40 psi / 2 turns
Shoot 2 (resized).jpg

SHOOT 3: 66% paint / 33% glue / 40 psi / 1-1/2 turns
Shoot 3 (resized).jpg

SHOOT 4: 66% paint / 33% glue / 50 psi / 1-1/2 turns
Shoot 4 (resized).jpg

SHOOT 5: 75% paint / 25% glue / 50 psi / 1-1/2 turns
Shoot 5 (resized).jpg

SHOOT 6: 75% paint / 25% glue / 40 psi / 3/4 turn
Shoot 6 (resized).jpg

SHOOT 7: 65% paint / 25% glue / 10% lacquer thinner / 40 psi / 3/4 turn
Shoot 7 (resized).jpg

Shoot 7 was the look I wanted. Fine webbing - sort of like Angel Hair type. Note how the addition of only 10% lacquer thinner stopped the "blobbing" issue. This is pretty much a dead-on perfect copy of how this old Bonanza cab was originally done.

Using the recipe from Shoot 7 again I (bravely) went out and shot the whole thing with it.
Final (resized).jpg

Love the results! The webbing worked great, had super good adhesion and was easy to apply. None of these were done using any "fan" air on the gun. Also do pay close attention to the needle setting. You can greatly vary the webbing thickness with more or less needle. I found that +/- only 1/8 of a turn made a difference.

Advantages to making your own webbing paint:
- infinitely variable effects depending on how its mixed
- mix custom colors
- much better surface adhesion than rattle-can stuff
- cheaper
- larger spray pattern makes it easier to apply a "random" look
- funner!

Nah! You firmly kicked our butts @ Cactus Jacks last night!

Now: y'all should know how much help Ken Head (aka P-52) has been in achieving a successful outcome here. There are a number of other details involved in getting a cabinet webbed properly; also in getting top notch results using stencils or templates to apply the cab art over the webbing. I'm an experienced painter, but still there are many ways a job like this can end in disaster, and Ken has been a major help in my own education in doing cab repaint work.

dudah - For measuring quantities I simply used small ratio cups obtained from a local hobby store. They’re also widely available online. The ratios were all done by volume, not by weight. But if you wanted to figure out a weight:volume relationship for the paint/glue/lacquer an accurate scale could also be used to set your ratios. And yeah I think you could web a whole cab with maybe 3 ounces of sprayable material total. Not much!

rufessor - the spray gun I used is a 20+ years old (Sears Craftsman branded) touch-up siphon feed gun but it’s nearly identical to the HF model pictured above. The main thing is that you use a siphon feed gun not HVLP as I believe it’s important to have the higher nozzle pressure to spit and sort of sling this heavy paint mixture out and get the webbing to behave correctly. I haven’t tested any HVLP guns for this but I think they just operate at too low pressure to work. These simple siphon feed guns are pretty cheap, like in the $20 range.

gdonovan - Fantastic results. Nice work there!

Did you use the Beacon glue, or another brand/type? I suspect that almost any clear acrylic glue would work.

Bill.

Hey Ken! Looking GREAT as always on that KOD.

For what its worth, mine here is even heavier than that. "Thicker" would best describe it:

KOD_Webbing (resized).jpg

I conducted a series of tests: various glues and paints to see where the paint + glue would be compatible.

The only combination I found was lacquer paint + acrylic glue. Everything else turned into globs of snot, unshootable goop, or a kind of tar like residue that was just nasty. Initially, I wanted to use oil based enamel as my paint base, but never found a glue that would work with it.

So, from my limited knowledge of this: the paint + glue used must be compatible. They must mix - not like thinner would, but at least they must not generate goopy junk that in and of itself remains basically separate from the rest of the mixture. Then, when its shot, it dries and strings up SO FAST that in mid-air, it generates the webbing.

Apart from taking 1000 frames per second video of this stuff emitting from the paint gun -- that's my *theory* on how webbing works as its applied from a sprayed source. The lacquer/glue mixture I used sprayed easily and produced webbing that had fantastic adhesion and very very low build height on the surface. Absolutely no need to sand or scrape off high spots with this it just lays down perfectly.