I'm always looking for new 3D items to airbrush. I created the J-Bombs to give me something unique to paint and were just an overall cool item. A friend of mine who works in the bowling industry recently offered me some Bowling Pins, I jumped on the offer! What could be cooler than some Hot-Rod bowling pins, or some cool designs on a unique item.

The bowling pins are USBC Approved Plastic coated, Brunswick Max pins. Now you'd think a bowling pin would be pretty quick to prep and paint, that is not the case...I have both new and used pins and both have issues that require lots of sanding, Bondo and serious body work to make smooth before paint.

I went with a used pin for this first one and it was pretty beat up. There are a few areas on the pin that get the most damage during use. The smallest part seems to get gouged pretty good on most of them, and there are large pock holes on the widest part and top of the pin. The base gets pretty chipped when it transitions to the nylon ring as well. There appears to be a clearcoat of some sort over the plastic coating. There are numerous tooling marks in the plastic coating and a 1/4 inch mold seam that runs all the way around the pin bottom to top and back down the other side. That seam is quite low and impossible to sand out.

You can see a large gouge and some of the dents and divots

I grabbed my 1/4 sheet Orbital Sander, loaded it with some 60 grit paper and went at that pin for the next 30 minutes in an effort to level out the blemishes and seam. Once you break through the clearcoat the plastic coating sands pretty good. I knocked down all the edges and got the pin ready for some Bondo.

 I mixed up some Bondo and filled in all the low spots and built up the transition from the bottom plastic to the nylon ring to make it once nice seamless transition. With all the weird convex and concave curves I didn't want to gouge too deep with the cheese grater, so I used some 60 grit drywall sandpaper. Its an open mesh type and fit perfectly on the orbital sander. It make pretty quick work of the bondo high spots. I switched to 60 grit regular paper and took the bulk of the Bondo off. Switched again to 150 grit and finished off the sanding.

I used an old tripod with an adapter I made to hold the bowling pin for paint, the pins already have a nice hole in the bottom perfect for a dowel inserted into the tripod. I wiped down the pin and shot a few heavy coats of high build primer. Scuffed that up with a red Scotch Brite pad and we're ready to basecoat!

Sprayed some Auto Air Sealer White as a base and cut out 90+ Skulls and bones on my Vinyl Cutter. This allowed me to spray down some Auto Air Sealer Dark once all the vinyl was applied and get some stenciled skulls to start with as a base. Here we are white with the vinyl applied.

After a couple of hours detailing each bone and skull a bit the pin is ready for some Candy.

I went with Auto Air Teal Candy (Not Candy Pigment) cut 1:1 with Auto Air Transparent Base, with a few drops of Auto Air Candy Pigment Purple to bring down the tone of the blue a bit.

I had photos of the pin masked for the flames, unmasked and ready for striping, then final stripe but those images were on a memory card that has disappeared mysteriously. I think the cat grabbed it, the little boner...

So, here are the final pics of it cleared and done.