It’s been a very frustrating for the last week or so. I’ve been trying to set up the spray gun for EkoPoly and having a difficult time. It turns out that Stewart’s has reformulated EkoPoly. The techniques for spraying EkoPoly shown on the Stewart’s instructional video are no longer used. I tried following the written instructions that comes with the paint. Stewart’s suggests testing the spray gun set up on the shiny side of butcher paper. I tried that many times with multiple settings on the spray gun. I couldn’t get the paint to flow out, lots of orange peel, runs and other poor results. I spoke to Dan at Stewart’s several times. He told me to try a technique different from the video and written instructions. He said to use three fogs coats, allowing each to dry to a tack described in the written instructions. Then put on one heavy wet coat with about 70% overlap on the spray coats. He also suggested getting a larger nozzle for my spray gun. I did that and also started priming the butcher paper with EkoPrime prior to spraying on the EkoPoly. I ended up with a much better result. The paint flows out to a nice shiny finish but it looks like it has a tendency to run. After more than a week and almost a half-gallon of paint it looks like I’m ready to start spraying color. The photo shows the results of two days of testing. I lost count of how many test shots I made or how many hours all this has taken. I would not try spraying the EkoPoly on butcher paper as per the Stewart’s instructions. The paint behaves much differently on a primed surface. There’s no telling how much time and paint I wasted doing that.
