To paint mags, or not?
While clean mags do look a bit odd with a painted blaster, mags which look tatty -having previously been painted – pretty much go with anything.
And that’s a major consideration if you’re using a common set of mags, for two or more blasters with different finishes.
Secondly, unless you’re doing something really quick on the blaster, which is easily matched when spraying the mags, getting the mags’pattern to correspond with the rest of the gun can be a ballache.
About a third of my mags are post-paint tatty, so that was an easy decision: leave them be, because they’ll go with anything: a clean blaster, a tatty blaster, a painted blaster.
The remaining mags left me with a bit of a quandary, because they retained enough of a previous spray job to potentially clash with any new pattern.
My decision was to paint over these mags with the new pattern.
The final problem was matching the mags to the new pattern. What resulted was a new approach.
With past paint jobs, I’d tried really hard to replicate a blaster’s pattern on the mags – being really exact. I never got it quite right, despite the effort involved.
True, you can paint one mag at the same time as the gun, to act as a template. It helps, but you’ve still got to paint the remaining mags separately, one by one. That’s really labour intensive and I’m more about industrialising processes than fucking about with bespoke shit. Basically, I’m lazy – but in a positive way. I’ll only put my back into stuff where the outcomes are properly beneficial.
This time, rather than being exact, I decided to paint the mags in the spirit of the blaster’s pattern. It’s worked out really well. I established a process and did the mags en masse.
Ironically, the mag I’ve used in these pics came out looking like I’d painted it at the same time as the blaster. Not all of them are as good, but all of them do exceed my acceptance criteria – so that’s pretty cool.
The Reptile House 