Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Fred's (hopefully) excellent HT adventure

Define effort. Its not hard per se, but it has been quite a bit of work figuring out the right way to do things. Hey, what else was I going to do over the holidays.

Tools and materials costs for the screen are now around $100. Extra costs have been a better mudding trowel, more mud and an extra quart of primer. Not a big deal.

For that screen you built, add another $60 to get the material to Canada plus exchange (@.86) and brokerage charges because of the required shipping method and a DIY screen would be up around $450.

Being in an apartment, I also don't have much space to lay out and build a screen. I'm still OK with what I've chosen to do.

Just do like my kids do. DAAAAAAAAAAD

I finally got to the point where I could put a coat of the final colour on the wall to test and...

What a disappointment.

The satin is too smooth, so I have hot spotting. I was prepared for that.

What I was not prepared for was the poor colour on the screen grey. The grey definitely improves black levels, but there's something wrong with the tint because everything looks kind of yellow washed out. I swear that things also look less clear. I was amazed at the amount of detail I was seeing projecting onto the final primer coat, and was expecting a slight improvement with the top coat. Sigh...

I'm going to do a bit more testing tonight with some material I've recently watched. I'm heading back to the plant to grab some plotter paper to put up on one side of the screen as a comparison.

Hang in there Fred. You're a stones throw from the penthouse windows!

I'm a dummy. I was using my LOTR to test. Its sd upscaled. Doh! Whatever scaler is being used sucks.

tape on fresh paint is not a good idea. Double Doh!!

The white plotter paper vs screen grey looks almost identical.

Does this mean you happy now.?? I am considering a projector though painting a wall is not an option for me. Give This a read. Pretty much says what you experienced.

At the moment, no. It appears I messed up on the first coat of paint and did not get proper adhesion of the primer.

Sigh...

Edit: I'm a little confused about why upscaling would mess with the colour. I may rent the LOTR bluray if I can find it to see what the movie looks like at full resolution.

Right now I need to figure out if I can patch the peeled paint or if I have to pull it all off...

I know exactly how you feel. I owned a house in Vancouver years ago and it had a basement suite and I bought primer at a discount outlet. I covered the room with primer and then painted it,the next day it was all peeling off. I am not sure just how long it took me to scrape it all off but I remember it not being much fun.

You would think that when a store sells nothing about paint, they would know a thing or two about paint, particularly unusual situations like paint over plaster. Nope.

I was looking to them (Benjamin Moor) for advice on what to do and they were of no help at all. I'm going to take the easiest route and try to patch up the spots where the paint lifted and hope that the rest of the paint holds up.

OK, I've had enough of painting. It took quite a few coats by hand to blend in the patches. Even then, one shows if you look carefully from less than 2 feet (and you know where to look).

I had a moment of total frustration last night as there was some blistering below one of the patches after the final coat. I just walked away. This morning the paint is down flat again, but I can see where the paint bubbled.

Its time to leave this alone and see what happens.

I've watched a few more movies waiting for paint to dry. Say, that could be the name of one of those weird '60s Italian art movies: Sitting On The Edge Of My Bed At The End Of The World Watching Paint Dry...

Anyway, while there is some hot-spotting, It only shows up in about 5% of the material I have watched to date and, with exception to the up-scaled LOTR stuff, is barely noticeable. If you could change the properties of this paint ever so slightly, it would be perfect.

I need to spend a couple of afternoons cleaning up all the plaster dust. The low dust plaster works well, but the tiny bit that gets away spreads like normal plaster. After that, I can work on the frame