APE APE April 2020 | Page 36

EXPERT ADVICE Acetone Paint May Turn Green www.callape.com [36] E very once in a while, I get a call asking why a customer’s white paint turned a lovely shade of minty green. I always know it’s the acetone paint, and the answer to the question is that it somehow reacts with older asphalt. I’ve had no issues with lay- outs on newer asphalt. I’ve also had no issues with simple restripes. No matter the cause, the fix is easy: Just stripe it again. I bid two coats. The second coat should cover it all. And, since stencils get a second coat anyway, it’s an easy fix. Safer AND Track-Free In my native Ohio, oil-based traffic marking paint has been outlawed be- cause it contains volatile organic com- pounds (VOC) that hurt the ozone. Since 2005 acetone paint instantly be- came our official cool weather paint. Nothing dries more quickly, and I’ve had no tracking issues. Tracking, to me, occurs when paint may be dry, but not thoroughly cured. Then, when a car drives over your new stripes, stop bars or cross walks, dirt is tracked and im- bedded into the paint. You’ll have tire marks. Bummer. I’ll never forget two stop bar projects. One was in summer, and the other was in the fall. The summer job was a hos- pital’s open parking lot. There were 25 stop bars that needed to be resprayed. I placed two strips of masking tape along the 24-inch dimension. I sprayed from the tape toward the curb. I slightly over- lapped five or six of the 12-foot stripes and built it out to a width of 24 inch- es. I pulled the tape and stood there for less than a minute. I stepped on the dry paint, saw no tracking and moved on to the next. Sometimes I rode over the new bar. Yes, it was summer -- but, again, ac- etone dries quickly and I saw no track- ing. The fall job was similar but includ- ed crosswalks. I remember leaving the house following Thanksgiving dinner, 1.800.210.5923