Seeing Dark Blade was a bit inspiring and so I'd like to "decorate" my own rig. I once custom painted my entire drumkit and I've done some metalwork before so I wouldn't totally be in the dark.

However, I need a paint that can adhere to both metal and plastic...any suggestions?

Use auto paint and get an adhesion promoter. You spray it on the plastic to create a chemical bond between the plastic and paint. I've used dupli-color spray cans before, pretty nice stuff.

If you have a compressor and want to spend the $ for the painting equipment you can get even better results.

Thanks for the info

I bought some black gloss dupli-color which worked great on the metal portions. It matched the original finish almost exactly. Just a bit of polish and it should be gravy.

I sprayed the plastic with the adhesion promoter and then a top coat of the black gloss. I need to apply 2-3 coats and I have a question about that:

Do I need to apply the adhesion promoter between coats or is the first application sufficient?

first is sufficient

or u can use regular auto-primer for first layer if u strip it all the way... works just the same and easier to look (in my case anyway)

Yeah, just need it at first. It's basically primer for plastic. While you don't have to have it, I've learned it's a good idea to use it. I used the duplicolor stuff, red... Real nice red too, wish I knew what exactly it was so I could shoot it with a spray gun. But I digress, I just primed the plastic parts and it was chipping off em like crazy.

Make sure to give it at least a week to dry before you start trying to polish it, as that clear can take a while if not baked with lamps or anything. Found that out with another project... Would have had to use a cutting compound to get the marks the wax left off of it... I didn't care about it that much...

Cool I decided to use a metallic charcoal instead because it will look a little better...two-tone and all. It will also offset the skull...yes...I'm putting a metallic silver skull with green LED eyes on the front :cool: I'll have pics in a week or two.

When I slapped the final coat on, this spidering effect showed up in a few places. I guess the Texas humidity is too high right now, but it's a really cool effect and should add to the rig

Cool, how you putting the skull on? Just a normal skull or like a punisher skull?

You can get some high grit sandpaper and wet sand out the orange peel (Bumpyness) if you want a totally flat finish.

Nah, I like it that way...kinda neat

It's an animatronic skull I bought from Walmart. I'm going to glue it to the front panel just above the fan so that the fan is inside the mouth of the skull. So when it opens and that Tornado revs up, it's like the skull is screaming

I got the idea from my brother. He comes over to see the new fans and he's like "Damn, that thing is loud as hell". So I thought of a screaming skull motif

There's a couple of engineering problems I'll have to tackle...like how to wire the skull in the front without having wires sticking out all over the place. It's going to conceal my bottom-most HDD port so I may run the wires through there. Also, I need to decide if I want the jaw to open on boot (which would be the coolest option) or just have it glued open. That little motor which moves the jaw probably won't last long if I use it.

I figure I can power the skull from my PSU...I have a small PCB that I can use because I'll need to step the voltage down with resistors. I haven't opened the skull yet to see how it's arranged but I'll have to do a bit of dremel work before I glue it to the front.