• LESSON 1 - Learning How To Learn
• LESSON 2 - Materials You'll Need To Practice
• LESSON 3 - Taking Care Of Your Pinstriping Brushes
• LESSON 4 - How To Hold A Pinstriping Brush
• LESSON 5 - Recognizing Good Swordsmanship

Taking Care Of Your Pinstriping Brushes

Many brushes come with an sizing compound on the bristles in order to keep the brush hair stiff and protected during shipping. Mack Series 10 brushes DO NOT come with sizing these days so don't worry about washing the sizing out of the Series 10 brush. In fact if you follow the instruction that are currently on the Mack Brush website you will ruin your brush like I did not too long ago.

The glue used on all Mack wrapped furrel brushes, like our trusty Series 10, is water soluble. Which means exposing the furrel to water will cause the glue to soften, the furrel will loosen and the hair will begin falling out.

Trimming

Most new pinstripers, my self included, will struggle with the brush initially and be tempted to trim the brush in hopes that it will magically correct our sloppy technique. The fact is that we don't have enough experience to customize a brush yet. Avoid the temptation to hack your brush up. At most, I will remove the very tip, approximately 1/64". This is not always needed though so take a close look at the brush. If you do decide to trim be very careful. If you take too much off the brush and blunt the end you won't be able to get an ultra fine line.

Here's how I trim my brush when it is required. Oil the brush up and form it to it's natural shape. Next lay the brush flat on a sheet of paper or other white surface so you can see exactly what needs trimming. Then, very carefully, use a razor blade to trim the smallest amount possible off hair off the tip of the brush.

untrimmed 000 Mack Series 10

Notice the angle of the blade is about 45%

Here you can just how little is actually taken off the brush

Cleaning

To adequately clean my brushes I rinse the brush thoroughly in mineral spirits. Typically, I rinse the brush first in the mineral spirits that I've been using to reduce and pallet my brush while striping. After a couple color changes this cup already pretty dingy looking. But the first rinse is just to get the majority of the paint out of the brush. Using a paper towel and the dirty mineral spirits I get as much paint out of the brush as possible. Then I poor some clean mineral spirits in another cup and wash the rest of the paint out. Be sure to clean all the paint off the furrel too. You'll know your brush is clean enough when you can't see any color on the paper towel. Once I'm happy with the cleanliness of the brush I squirt a little 3-n-1 oil on the brush and shape it with my fingers. The oil insures than any paint remaining in the brush does not dry up and harden in the brush and ruin it.

If you are really, really diligent about cleaning your brushes you don't really have to use any oil. Joey "Hotlines" Madden, an amazingly talented pinstriper with decades of experience uses a 3 stage cleaning process for cleaning 1-shot from his brushes, and he doesn't use oil on his brushes. But I'm not that diligent, so as a precaution I use oil, and I have not had any trouble yet.

I should probably remind you that this method is only applicable if you are using an enamel paint, like 1-Shot, Kustom Shop, or Ronan. If you are using House of Kolor, or some other urethane based paint the cleaning methods will be different.

Storage

Once your brush is clean and oiled its ready for storage. Where you keep your brushes is up to you, what's important is that the brush lays flat so that the hair rests in its natual position. I keep all my brushes in my travel box in which I've created brush holders out of packing foam. One thing I've noticed is that some surfaces, like paper, will suck the oil out of a brush after a while. So I suggest that the brush rest on a metal or plastic surface that won't leach oil from the brush hair.

Re-Shaping a Brush

If you ever get a brush with a kink or a wave in it, commonly referred to as a "set", taken from surfer lingo I think, you can usually fix it. To remove a "set" from a brush, first rinse the brush thoroughly in mineral spirits. Then carefully rinse the brush in water, DO NOT GET THE FURREL WET, just rinse the hair in water, and dab it in a paper towel to remove most of the water. Then add a drop of dish soap to the hair and shape the brush using your fingers. Now you can lay the brush flat, or if the set is more severe, put the brush between the pages of a phone book to press is flat. Let it dry out in this position for a week. After a week rinse the soap out in mineral spirits and the brush should be back in shape.