Painting a Daisy Drill Rifle

DrillMasterCommentary, Drill Teams, Honor Guard, Instructional 6 Comments

Well, I did it. I bought a used Daisy Drill Rifle and decided to see what it would be like to paint it. I wanted to go through the process, learn what to do and then share it here. Here we go!

If you have a new rifle, follow the directions below. If your rifle has a couple of dings, gouges or scratches, you can sand down the scratches and, if you want, you can fill in the gouges and even deep scratches with a sandable epoxy (do not use a regular epoxy, it has hundreds of little bubbles in it- I know…), let it dry and then sand it down ready for priming.

You must be patient during this process, it takes a couple of days at least!

Start by taking the rifle apart (you need a Philips screwdriver, Allen wrenches), wiping it down with a damp rag, letting it all dry and then spraying all of the pieces with primer. Spray one side and let the primer dry for an hour or so and then spray the other side. You must make sure that the primer is dry! The only way to paint the round swivel nuts was to put them on a pair of needle nose pliers(third picture)

 

Epoxy filled and sanded ready for primer:

The Upper hand guard of the rifle I purchased has a split in it and I decided I would try to epoxy it together and see if that would work- It didn’t. However, I did drill small holes into either side of the split, put epoxy along both sides of the split and put pieces of a paperclip in the holes for the epoxy to hold on to. It’s a fair job and suffices, but I really need to replace this piece. Here is a picture of the holes I drilled.

The epoxied pieces and the epoxy filler for the gouges. The upper hand guard pieces are already painted because I tested the paint I wanted to use on them.

Here is the end result after putting the rifle back together, not the most desirable look, but it was worth testing.

After one coat of primer, wipe down with a damp rag and start painting. I decided to paint everything on my rifle and use a black and gold color theme: all the metal pieces gold and all of the resin pieces (the stock) glossy black (I used Krylon Fusion For Plastic). I also painted all of the metal pieces, even the parts that do not show, to prevent rust.

In the picture below, you can also see a flagstaff ferrule (the bottom piece of a flagstaff) that I painted silver toward the bottom of the picture. I’m trying to figure the best way to paint silver pieces to avoid the high costs of re-plating scratched chromed metal pieces. All post an article on that soon.

A note on a top coating: I tried a clear gloss (Rust-Oleum Painter’s Touch), but would recommend what Driller Sam Gozo uses: several coats of polyurethane to make incidental dings as unnoticeable as possible.

OK, the metal parts are all painted and one thing I discovered is that the upper and lower retaining bands, where the sling and stacking swivels are attached, should not be painted at the bolt holes so that you can reattach the swivel pieces. Use painter’s tape on the butt plate to not paint the bottom. You can paint the bottom black.

 

For the Retaining Bands, don’t paint the area indicated in the circle since, as you can see it chips off anyway.

I let all of the pieces sit overnight between coatings of paint and clear gloss so it took a few days to get everything painted and dried and then coated and dried and then put back together.

When you put the rifle back together, be careful so as not to remove the paint on the stock!

 

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