Eddie Van Halen Custom Rifle Paint Job (EVH Tribute)

van halen was outrageous in every way and so was eddie van halen's signature guitar the frankenstrat this guitar was built by eddie himself including the iconic striped paint job sadly eddie died on october 6 2020 at the age of just 65. fortunately eddie's music and his legendary guitar will live on for generations to come i decided to build a bench rest rifle as a tribute to eddie van halen as i've been inspired by his guitar playing his energy and himself as a person [Music] gavin you hear from ultimatereloader.com it's done my first bench rest rifle build and when i set out to build this rifle i was looking around at what other people were doing in the bench rest community and i thought wow this is some outrageous over-the-top outlandish stuff we're talking about cheetah prints bowling ball looking figured stocks and high gloss paint talking about fantasy airbrush paint jobs large american flags i thought i need to do something loud and crazy and when i thought about that the first thing that came to mind was eddie van halen's iconic frankenstrat so this builds on my own personal history when i was 16 years old i was hell-bent on learning auto body prep and paint work in fact i was so determined i opened up the yellow pages that's right we had yellow pages at the time i called every auto body shop within about a 20 mile radius of where i was living at the time nobody needed help except for one body shop i got the job i started prepping i worked my way up i did my first complete professional paint job on a toyota supra in late 1990 when i was 17 years old this was a major accomplishment and i learned a ton from the guys that i work with and we had some really premium equipment as well before we get into the specifics for this paint job let me briefly recap the machining i did for the barrel work and the work on the mill for the stock so this build started with the barrel work and i've got a complete article and video covering that process we've got a bat model b action we've got a krieger barrel this is chambered in six five by 47 lapua not a super popular bench rest cartridge but this rifle is my test bed rifle i wanted to build this to do precision shooting to take all of the shooter factors all of the rifle factors out of the equation at least as much as i could so i chambered this barrel on the precision matthews pm14 40 gt lathe with tribal reamers from germany super super top shelf stuff then came the work on the stock this is the wheeler accuracy lrb stock which is manufactured by macmillan composites and what it comes as is kind of raw the fiberglass has the gel coat on the outside and it's basically a solid hunk up here we're going to cut the barrel channel where you're going to do the inletting work for the receiver area and that's cut a little bit big because you're going to follow that up with epoxy bedding i used devcon f2 which is an aluminum powder and got everything settled into place did a bunch of fit and finish machining to get everything just perfectly how i wanted it to be that was the build so far then came a bit of research i did a bunch of viewing online a bit did a bunch of reading about eddie van halen his iconic frankenstrat guitar and how this evolved it's a pretty interesting story he basically took a bunch of essentially after market fender stratocaster parts i don't know if there's a single fender part on there separate aftermarket bodies separate aftermarket neck and so on and so forth put this thing together initially it was black and white striped and it was a pretty cool paint job but eddie van halen evidently was very kind of upset with how many people were copying him so one day in 1977 i think it was late 1977 he was visited in his backyard and he did this iconic paint job with schwinn bicycle paint i would give anything to be there to see that so understanding the story helped me to be better inspired with regard to how i was going to lay out this paint job now my painting setup is not exactly what i had at that professional body shop that i worked for i have great plans for a paint booth for cerakote and other types of mostly rifle related coatings work here at the shop but i have for the time being what i would call kind of a third world setup i'm cleaning my paint gun out in the dirt with a cardboard mat laid out on the ground i've got my lacquer thinner going i used a tripod that i had originally manufactured for cooking over a fire to suspend the rifle stock again better plans for that i'm using a astro euro pro hvlp gun this is not a super expensive gun this is a 1.4 millimeter tip if you click on that first link in the video description i'll link to it on amazon it has given me great results and if you watch my warner swayze number two vintage metallay this is a world war ii era metal lathe refinishing story on making with metal i used this same gun for that work i'm using omni by ppg this is a base coat clear coat acrylic urethane and i'm using a two-part epoxy primer you've got the primer base and then you've got the catalyst this is really really good stuff it is not cheap i spent a fair bit of money at the auto body supply store but it is really really important to use the right products if you want an automotive style paint job like this that's going to last for the duration so that's a bit of a background on the components and the research work that i did next it was time to start the painting prep a common saying at the auto body shop is a good paint job is really all in the prep work you can't get a really good result if you're not willing to put in the time to get things ready and where i started with this rifle stock paint job was to use glazing putty this is kind of like bondo but it's really really fine it doesn't leave the voids and the little air bubbles like you get with bondo and you also can't put it on as thick but i didn't need to the major portion of the work there was the barrel channel when i did the inleting on the barrel channel it leaves open pores on the fiberglass in place there where the channel was cut and so i formed a special spreader out of a bondo kind of putty knife kind of a thing and conform that to the exact radius of this barrel channel inlet spread on the glazing and then guide coated that this is dry guide coat it is kind of like black paint it's something that you fog over an area where you're going to do some sanding to see how far you need to go and basically you stop sanding when you stop seeing black dots or lines any evidence of of that guide coat so i spent a while with a tubular piece of aluminum and sandpaper guide coating multiple coats of the glaze i also glazed other details on the rifle where i needed a little bit of filler to fill imperfections or anything like that and again the result in the end is well worth the effort here it is a lot of painstaking work and it takes a lot of time but if you can lean into that and enjoy it you really feel that satisfaction feeling of craftsmanship then it was time to go with the first coat of epoxy primer and i was using a small gun i had to take it back to the auto body shop didn't work super well so i but i got the first coat on it's probably two or three coats actually total guide coated that and wet sanded with 400 grit paper this is where you're looking at your orange peel you're knocking that down you're looking at taking out scratches epoxy primer isn't good for feeling really large scratches or other imperfections but this is kind of a little bit further along it was smoother to start with so that worked pretty good i put on the second coat of the epoxy primer actually the second coatings had i think three coats total with the euro pro and this went much better i was able to lay it down really heavy so that's good for filling and then it lays a little bit flatter less orange peel guide coated that and wet sanded it again i'm really taking my time i'm using a squeegee as a backer 3m makes a good rubber squeegee it gives a nice flat sanding surface i've got a foam pad that i'm using and i'm also standing by hand where you've got different types of compound curves and things like that where you really just need kind of the contour of your finger to get that sanded at this point the prep work is done now comes the fun part and that is the paintwork i had masked off my inletting area you don't want any paint where your receiver was bedded to the stock because even the thickness of paint is too much material and we've already established that perfect mating surface the receiver and the cradle which is that epoxy bedding surface so from the priming i had masked all that off i took that off i didn't want too much of a buildup on the masking so i remasked that and masked off some of the others the bedding on the trigger guard in leading i mashed off all the other parts that weren't going to be red now i started with red i probably should have finished with red i think that's what eddie van halen did it all turned out in the end but basically if you tape over a previous coat of white and or black and then hit it with the red there's a little bit less work for the masking i learned that a little bit later nonetheless i saw a red background and i started with the red base coat the base coat is a urethane it uses a reducer i think that was mixed one to one if i remember correctly i laid down the red it laid down really nice with this astro euro pro gun i think i did three coats total and then i allowed that to dry i did a little bit of spot wet sanding on that just to remove any areas where there are imperfections and then proceeded to get ready to do the detailed masking for the white stripes and this i used this is vinyl tape 3m quarter inch vinyl tape this is what you use in a professional body shop context for striping and other details things like that a two-tone paint job it gives a really nice crisp line it's really easy to do curves and to follow contours that kind of thing so i used a razor blade and cut out all of the areas perfectly for where these white stripes cross over each other and got ready to lay down the white base coat so i did a few coats of the white base coat i unmasked it i wasn't completely happy with how things looked where some of the intersections of the tape were so i did a little bit of touch up hand painting there then it was time to do the detailed masking for the black base coat and again this was very similar to the white stripe areas of masking but this time at smaller areas i ran a couple stripes along the top and along the bottom that's a little bit different than what eddie van halen did but again this is evh inspired it's not intended to be a direct copy so i did the black base coat and got that all unmasked one note it has been 30 years since i've been in the auto body industry do not use blue tape i didn't use it around anything this is the blue painters tape like you used on your house i was kind of masking off larger errors with that and it turns out that these paints can kind of attack through the bleed through the blue tape and that wasn't good in a couple areas not a huge crisis but this green tape works really really well that in conjunction with the vinyl blue tape really really good stuff again 3m in both cases so i did a few more touch-ups and got ready for the clear coat this is this is when things really really start to look good because you're covering up all those masked transitions between the striping and the background and this omni clear lays down really really nice the key thing i focus on when i'm doing any kind of coatings application is you've got to see the reflection of a light on the surface this gives you visual feedback and you're going to know exactly how much material to put down i'm running static air pressure and then you're controlling the fluid flow with the trigger and always going in a controlled pattern you don't want to do this you know i hate seeing that on home improvement shows that is not how you paint but when you can see that reflection of light on the clear coat or the base coat or whatever it is you're throwing down you can get this really really nice finish and this clear it really just flowed really nicely and gave a really really really nice finish now i did have a couple areas that i needed to touch up so the next day i went and i wet sanded a couple very very small areas we had a little bit of an issue with air pressure we had turned off the compressor for filming and that caused a little bit of a build up in one area not a problem i knocked it down with some 600 paper and then went over that with 1500 grit paper and then did a little bit of polishing in this case with the drill such a small area with foam backer pads and rubbing compound and stuff like that i already said painting is the fun part but i feel like the final unmasking is just as fun everything was dried my polishing was done so i proceeded to very very carefully take off the masking from all of the base coat and the clear coat operations and i was extremely happy with how clean the lines were especially around the receiver inletting area this is a little bit different than masking i've done for you know auto paint jobs and things like that and it gave me a really nice crisp edge everything fit really nice i have one slight touch up to do here where the bolt goes back because the caulking piece needs just a touch more clearance so i'm going to clearance that a little bit and do a little bit of white touch-up paint what you can also see here is a preview of the complete rifle with optic i've got the sightron s3 here this is available at creedmoor sports this is kind of a little bit of a preview it's not even completely installed this is just kind of finger tight but this is the final dry fit of the rifle i'm considering epoxy bedding the bottom half of the rings like i did on my 6 dasher build that worked out really really good and this scope has a fine cross hair with a very very tiny aiming dot in the middle that's going to be really good for this bench rest shooting the anticipation is absolutely killing me as you've seen in the progression of these stories i put so many hours and so much work into this build i cannot wait to shoot this thing i even got special edgewood bags edgewood has a rear bag that is custom tailored for the lrb stock and i got a bag for the sinclair front bench rest that i'm using that has a four inch four end width to it this is going to be a totally totally killer setup and i would hope that if eddie van halen could see this rifle that he would feel honored by what i'm doing here i'm not trying to steal any glory from him i just think he's a cool guy he completely changed the game with guitar he figured out that paint job that has inspired me visually and personally this is really really cool stuff so happy with the build make sure you subscribe with notifications because i've got the shooting videos coming up we're going to break this thing in we're going to get the scope installed we're going to do some low development can not wait and here's what i want to know is what do you think of this crazy paint job and are you shooting a bench rest rifle what does your paint job look like drop a comment and we'll start a discussion that concludes this video and that means it's time to wrap it up i hope you liked this video if you did please give it a big thumbs up also make your voice heard if you have something to say please drop a comment make sure you're subscribed with notifications because you're not going to want to miss the awesome content that is coming up and finally flex your reloading pride you could look great in one of these t-shirts we've got multiple designs at the ultimate reloader store i'll see you later because i'm off to go shooting [Music] you

Channel: gavintoobe

Views: 22,873

Rating: 4.8552279 out of 5

Keywords: .223 Remington, 224 Valkyrie, 45 ACP, 5.56 NATO, 6.5 Creedmoor, 6.5x47mm Lapua, 9mm parabellum, AR-10, AR-15, Benchrest, Eddie Van Halen, EVH, Frankenstrat, Glock, Long range rifle, m1911, Reloading, Reloading Blog, Reloading Press, Reloading Videos, Rifle Builds, Rifle Theme Build, Ultimate Reloader, diy frankenstrat, eddie van halen, paint job, HVLP Paint Gun, Astro Europro, Autobody, Basecoat Clearcoat, Acrylic Urethane Paint

Id: MEzNs_b4ZmU

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021