... wet sanding the color coat of my Mirage coated panels against everyones warnings when I realized WAIT! I need to write an article. So I'd first off like to say - anyone who thinks sanding the color coat of this stuff will ruin the effect - go bugger off! Stop spreading that urban legend of rattle can painting. Nothing pisses me off more than misinformation.. so on that note I think I'll write about reality vs. "obvious" in computer user cicles.


Okay - to clarify my bold statement contradicting the common knowledge about color shifting paints. Lets start off with some information about it. Color shifting "paints" are just your run of the mill clear coat with an additive, so like a clear you can sand it! Microprisms or not, it's clearcoat.... when you sand it, sure you might knock off some of that "magic powder" with the clear, but clear coat changes the way/amount of light that will reflect, I want a smooth bottom (base) and color (mid) so the amount of material is uniform. I do this for two reasons 1) I want to prove it's fine to do for everyone out there with photographic proof 2) in theory this should increase the rate of "flop" or shift to the next color as there aren't small bumps causing the light to reflact at different points causing a delayed shift. I've also got 12 coats of color on these puppies if you're wondering if I'm going to hit the base coat... I don't think so.

Something else I'd like to talk about - dBA of fans/PSUs and other related items. Did you know there isn't one uniform way of measuring it? So take it as a rough estimate... when you're comparing same manufacturer to same manufacturer. When comparing two different brands, it means zilch really. Some manufacturers test at as close as 6 inchs some as far as 2 feet making the numbers nearly useless! So when someone asks you about quiet/high performance fans.... if it's not first hand advise, always give the disclaimer "they claim."

While I already mentioned then passingly above, PSUs (aka Power Source Units.. aka thing that's skimped on most often and ruined many pieces of hardware.) The ratings on these collections of misc. electronical doo-dads are 75% of the time laughable beyond belief. Give ratings of output at 20c when they're often at 40c or more during operation, infact anyone else remember when Enermax rated their PSU's peak based on an assumed 0c tempature? I think the only true rating you might get half the time worth anything is weight, but now days with the extra "bling" most are manufactured with that's not even a given. Please don't buy cheap, I did once.. lost a lot of hardware, now the most expensive single item in my rig is my PSU.

Anyways, those were some things I'd like to share/let you fine folks think about. I'm going back to wet sanding at 1:00AM while I also surf looking for a resperator... if you're wondering why I want a resperator, see if I have any typos, because I'm sure I do.

Iateronmly - Reaking of every Duplicolor product you could imagen.

Hehehe.... fun read, Lateronmly!!!

And yes.. I've probably inhaled so much Duplicolor/Motip 'fumes I probably have permanent brain
damage from them... (and my wife still thinks it's the 'booze..lol..) but who cares? It still is one of the
best products found in a "rattlecan"....

As far as PSU's concern... http://www.dirkvader.de/ has one of the best testing methods, imho...
Sadly, it's all in German (but you can try run them through Babelfish....) ... very consistent....
So... I'd rather rate PSU's, personally, from sites who test a bunch & test them exactly the same way each
time... might not be perfect but it sure beats manufactureresrs 'specs!!!

TDR

I know very little about painting but from experiance with psu's the only brands I will trust with an expensive pc are PC power and cooling and tagen (but not all of their models). Antec etc all fall out of the ATX spec way before their max rated load is reached. I would never buy a power supply which made the air turn 90 degrees and left spots of stagnent air like the 120mm designs aswell (hence not going for all tagens powersupplys). I would also never ever trust the monitoring chips on motherboards, mine bleats constantly if I turn it on complaining of low voltages, yet when I test with a multimeter the voltages are exactly what they should be and rock steady even while gaming.

anyone rember when it was thought that having a high flow pump on a low flow block negitivly effected performance?