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Overview
You just got that nice 120mm Panaflo, or some other fan, and you notice how boring it is compared to the rest of your kickin' case... Wouldn't it be nice to have your fans match your case mod painting scheme? Well it can!
After considering many things about painting a fan, such as what type of paint, what painting technique, will the paint throw off the balance of the fan, etc..., I decided to give it a try. After all, it is only like $5.00 for a fan, so why not try and mod it.
The first attempt
The first idea I came up with was to use Testors paints with a small brush that I picked up from a hobby store for about $5.00. I picked up some bright yellow paint, which would go good with my case mod. I had to paint very carefully so as only to paint the blades and the parts that spun when the fan was powered up. However, given that the fan was black, it was gonna require many coats to get a nice yellow appearance. After 2 coats it became apparent that this was the wrong approach to painting a fan. There was entirely too much paint on there and you can totally see the stroke marks. Not good. Check out the pics and you'll see why. Score: -1 fan.
The second attempt
Not wanting to be defeated, I went back to basics, spray paint. I found the best way to do this was to use 1 coat of primer, and 1 or 2 coats of yellow spray paint, depending on how much yellow you applied with the 1st coat. However, since I only wanted the blades to be painted, not the entire frame, some masking tape was in order if I was going to spray this puppy. Very carefully, mask everything off except for the blades, even the small opening where the spinning part meets the non-spinning part, as best you can.
Masked the front |
And the back side |
Once done, prime it and let it dry for a day. A tip about painting... paint the back side first (the sticker facing you), so that when you turn the fan over, the exposed blades will not accidentally touch the surface of whatever you are painting on and screw up your paint job. Once dry after 24 hours, you don't really have to sand it down, hard to do, unless you have some huge bug trapped in there. Just make sure you get out any small dust particles, etc... Plus, you don't want dust going into the innards of your fan, and you certainly do not want to wet sand either.
All primed up and ready to be painted |
Then you can spray on the yellow spray paint using the same technique as with the primer. Let it sit for another 24 hours until fully dry.
Paint applied and ready to dry |
Carefully remove the masking tape, making sure you don't fuck up your paint job.
All done. Nice!
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Again, all done
on the other side |
Ala kazam! Painted fan! Now I had to be sure that the fan still worked, so I plugged it in and no problems. So there you go,... a painted fan.
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