Anyone who has finished a powder-coated sign knows the pain: the background is done, but the raised lettering still needs paint, and masking around every edge by hand is miserable. That is exactly the problem the maker tackles here with a trick that is almost embarrassingly simple: sand becomes the mask.
The project is a large white metal business sign for a construction company, with standoff-mounted letters and a corporate logo on a powder-coated background. After taping off the outer margins with brown masking paper and blue painter's tape, the maker pours two 50-pound bags of Quikrete all-purpose sand across the surface and gently smooths it around the letters so it covers the background and the standoff pins without scratching the powder coat. A yellow DeWalt cordless blower on a low setting clears the sand off the tops of the letters.
The details that stand out to me are the small touches. Misting the sand bed with water from a spray bottle keeps it from shifting during painting, and the letter surfaces get dried with blue Scott shop towels. Two coats of spray primer go on, sanded between coats with a 3M sanding sponge, then a hammer-texture spray paint applied while a small board shields nearby sections. Topcoat colors include green and dark gray, and compressed air blows the sand away at the end, leaving clean painted letters on an untouched background.
The trade-off I would flag is that the maker ran out of paint, so the final peel on this particular piece never got shown. For a technique meant to save time on 3D painting jobs, that seems like the one gap left open, though the finished sign is shown installed outdoors.
Project by 42Fab. Watch it on their YouTube channel: