John Norrell Arms

Generally speaking, three ounces of product will coat an AR-15 size rifle when using an airbrush. An eight ounce bottle will refinish 2 to 3 AR-15 rifles. This will give you an idea of how much to purchase to refinish other firearms. Handguns, magazine, etc. will require much less. If you use some type of other sprayer than an airbrush, you will use much more product to coat the same surface area.

How do I obtain a finish flatter in appearance than what the flat products already produce?

If you pre-heat to the standard recommended temperature of about 100 f. you will achieve the standard flat appearance. If you pre-heat the metal to a higher temperature such as 300 f you will achieve a flatter finish. Even the semi-gloss black product will appearance flat using a higher pre-heat temp.

The semi-gloss black when cured turns out with more flat appearance than glossy.

See answer # 2. Lower your pre-heat temperature. Also be sure to remove any paint or other coating on the metal surface before coating with Moly Resin. We have noticed that with HK rifles and UZI, for example, if you do not totally removed the original paint down to the metal before spraying, the cured Semi-Gloss Black Moly Resin finish will be dull and not semi-gloss.

The product will come off the metal after cured when I use common cleaning solvents.

The product must be cured at 300 f. for an hour. Check the oven temperature. Don't trust the thermostat on the oven, especially if you use a home-cooking oven. Purchase a cooking thermometer and place it in the center of the oven. Please note: Moly Resin is not a paint that hardens when air dried. It must be thermally cured to harden and only then will it resist solvents and abrasions.

Can I make the coating harder?

The normal curing temp and time for all thermal cure coatings (except glossy black) is 300 degrees for one hour. Raising the cure temp to 325 for 1.5 hours will make the coating harder but there is some loss in flexibility. The Glossy Black thermal cure coating should normally be cured at 325 degrees for 1.5 hours but may be cured at 350 degrees for 2 hours for maximum hardness.

I glass beaded the surface of the metal, pre-heated, applied the coating and cured it at 300 f. but it does not stick very well.

Don't use glass beads to prepare the metal. Glass beads polish the surface of the metal therefore preventing good adhesion of any type of coating including paint.

When I spray, I get wet shiny spots. Some of these spots show up after the finish is cured.

You are holding the airbrush too close to the surface and spraying too much coating in one spot and you may have let the metal cool down. Keep the airbrush a minimum of eight inches back from the metal and keep it moving. Don't stop in any one spot and do not try to coat the metal in one pass. Pre-heating the metal allows the solvent to evaporate immediately to avoid runs and wet shiny spots. If the metal cools down put it back in the oven to warm it up.

When I pre-heat some parts, oil runs out of the metal. I keep wiping it off but it keeps bleeding out.

Some firearms have joints and cavities that are very hard to degrease fully. One way to get around this problem is to spray the parts without pre-heating ( see question # 8). When curing, the oil will bleed out but it will be on top of the Moly coating. Once cured, you can usually just wipe off the excess oil or grease with no harm to the finish or its adhesion.

When I spray, the coating appears to be thin and almost clear. I have to use a lot of it to get the metal coated. When I spray the coating, it sprays thicker and chalky and does not stick well once cured.

These are the same questions. Moly Resin contains powdered metal and other solids as lubricants to resist abrasions. The powdered solids and pigments are heavy and will settle out on the bottom of the bottle. You must shake the product bottle and the airbrush bottle well to keep these solid in suspension. If you don't, you will spray almost clear phenolic resin without solids and then later as you get down to the solids, you will be spraying solids without the phenolic resin. The easy solution is to keep the product shaken well. No solids should be on the bottom of the product bottle or airbrush bottle after shaking.

I'm (actually my wife) is concerned with using our home kitchen oven for curing my gun parts.

Curing parts coated with Moly Resin will not damage your home-cooking oven. There is no contact between the coated parts and the walls of the oven since you will spray the coating on the parts either outside, in the garage or in a ventilated paint booth. The objection you may encounter will be an odor if you do not allow the coating to thoroughly dry before placing the parts in the oven. The heat from the oven will obviously vaporize any liquid solvent in the coating if not completely dry.

After curing the coating on my Colt AR-15 firearm it looks very dry, flatter and lighter than the original Colt finish.

After curing the finish it is totally dried out, ultra flat and void of any oils from the heat. Oil the surface of the firearm and wipe it off. The finish will darken and take on a slight sheen. If you need the finish to be slightly more glossy, briskly rub the surface with a cotton cloth to slightly polish it.

The shade of the color I'm trying to match is somewhere between your Flat Black and your Grayish-Black Flat. The Flat Black is too dark and the Grayish-Black is too light.

Our Flat Black is colored to match the later Colt AR-15 and M-16 color and the Grayish-Black Flat is colored to match the earlier Colt AR-15 and M-16 colors. Colt, however, produced lighter and darker version of the finishes. You may see the slight color difference between upper and lower receivers on some new in the box Colt rifles. You may mix our Gray, Grayish-Black and Flat Black in any combination you want to produce the shade you desire.

I have an old parkerized military rifle that has a green tint to it. I would like to duplicate this color.

The green parkerizing is due to its storage in Cosmoline grease. The grease reacted with the park finish and shaded it green. We offer Greenish-Gray Moly Resin that is darker than our standard U.S. Military O.D. Green.

Can a camo pattern (including digital patterns) be done with Moly Resin?

Numbers of customers use Moly Resin for regular camo and also with digtial camo patterns. As with any camo job there is skill involved, a need for attention to detail and it is sometimes an art form too. The basic question with doing camo is 1.) whether to cure each color to hardened then apply the next color and harden it, or 2.) spray all the colors like you want and then harden them all at the same time. The answer is that either way will work. #1 is slower but there is less chance in messing things up and therefore does not require delicate handling. #2 is faster but the uncured finish is not hard till heated to 300 for an hour and using tape on uncured paint can mess it up. This methods requires being very careful.
Generally, use lighter colors for hunting in winter and open fields and darker colors if hunting in the woods. However, most fellows do camo for purely cosmetic enjoyment and just to have something different than a regular black finish.

What is the shelf life of thermal cured Moly Resin as I sometimes do not use all the product on a project and want to save some for a later day.

The hardener in thermally cured Moly Resin products is a catalyst that is temperature activated. It should be noted that for any type coating to harden (cure) regardless of brand it requires some type of catalyst to change the chemistry of the coating. For most paints, such as common air dry paints like home and construction paints, it is not the simple drying of that paint that hardens it but rather oxygen in the air reacting as a catalyst in the paint to change it chemically to harden. Epoxy paints, for example, can cure in an non-oxygen environment and even under water because a catalyst is mixed in that is chemically activated and has nothing to do with air, oxygen or temperature. Up-scale automotive paints use an add-in hardener you mix with the paint right before spraying it. Unfortunately, adding a hardener ruins any left over paint that you would like to have saved for future use.

For easy workability, thermally cured Moly Resin products use a temperature activated catalyst which allows un-cured Moly Resin to be simply wiped off with MEK or Acetone before curing it. This helps the user get it sprayed on exactly like they want before they harden it. Shelf life of the thermally cured Moly Resin is about a year stored at room temperature, however, shelf life may be significantly extended if the bottle is keep in a cool environment like a refrigerator. The paint lasts longer in metal cans and has a shorter shelf life in plastic. That is due to what is known in the bottling industry as "paneling" where some small molecule solvents gradually pass through a plastic bottle's sides. Paneling changes the chemistry in what is left in the bottle and can ruin it. The metal can does not allow that to happen but if you refrigerate the plastic bottles, then the paneling effect is significantly reduced. So keep the plastic bottles cool especially if you have a color you want to have on hand but do not use much of it. We ship Moly Resin sometimes in metal cans especially when the weather is hot in the summer or we have a customer that is looking for extended storage. You may request the product in metal or plastic if you have a special need.