Preval Sprayer - Best Way To Use

[KarenVT]

A newbie to leathercraft, and I have tons to learn. Just one of the many things that makes leathercraft so exciting. This site is an excellent resource. I greatly appreciate the information provided.

My question is about the best way to use a Preval sprayer for applying Super Sheen. I closely followed the directions provided by Tandy on how to use the sprayer. The result was not what I expected. The super shene was not applied as a thin layer but tended to "bubble-up" for lack of a better description.

The reason I wanted to use the Preval sprayer was to prevent the removal of the dye from the leather that occurs when I use a sponge to apply the super sheen.

My project consisted of 2 pieces of leather that I tooled, applied colored dye, and then super sheen over the colored dyed areas followed by hi-light stain over all the leather. I sprayed both the leather pieces with super sheen. On the first leather piece, I wiped off the super sheen that "bubbled-up" with a cloth and the second I left alone to see what would happen. When I used the cloth, of course, dye came off in the areas that I had not resisted. On the piece that I left alone, it seemed to speckle the leather. Note- I did the spraying in my garage and the temp was about 40 degrees.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Karen

[JustKate]

Hi Karen,

One possibility that I see is that you may be spraying shene on a bit too heavily. I presume you're trying to get it to cover completely in one pass with the sprayer. In my experience with spraying on acrylic finishes, I found it works better to spray it on two or three very light coats, waiting about 10 minutes between coats.

[GlenH]

I think the instructions on the sprayer say you need to thin whatever you're spraying. So maybe try thinning it with water and see what happens. But Tandy sells it in a spray bottle, so maybe you should get a spray bottle and try that?

[KarenVT]

Thanks for the responses. I did make an attempt to spray thin but maybe I was still a little heavy handed. It looks to me that the Tandy spray bottle is just a normal type spray bottle. I didn't go that route because I thought it would do more of a heavy spray than the Preval sprayer. I plan to do some experimenting in the near future.