Well ran into a snag with the front trim pieces. I painted them last Wed. They looked good. I let them set till yesterday and put one on. My plan was to glue them as I did not want any screws to show, and screwing in from the back was not an option, as the pieces are only 1/2" thick which means to screw in from the back, the screws would not have a whole lot of meat to grab into and would most likely strip out if I tightened them very much. If any of you have ever worked with this MDF knows it is not very good for screws to hold into, it strips out and is not very strong.
Well I attempted to install the first piece. My plan was to put the glue on the back of the piece and clamp it to the baffle and let is sit overnight for the glue to dry. I did not want to clamp directly onto the trim piece as this would dent or mar the paint. So my bright idea was to use a piece of wood with a piece of paper towel between it and the trim piece to pad the wood on the paint. So I go out this morning, removed the clamps, and to my horror found the paper towel stuck to the paint! Even after 3 days the paint (acrylic enamel) is still to soft. I wet sanded, buffed ans polished the paint by hand. It took all the paper towel fibers off the trim ok, and it shines like a piece of glass, but the grain pattern or the paper towel is impregnated in the metallic of the paint. Where this is glued on I would not be able to remove it without damaging the piece to paint again, so my only option will be to carefully, painstaking mask it off to repaint.
Another thing I found is the trim pieces cupped a bit, I guess from the moisture of the primmer, sealer, and paint, on the one side. This to me would mean that the ends of the pieces will always have a pressure force to want to pull away from the front baffle. I'm thinking with the characteristics of MDF, down the road the ends of the trim pieces could pull away from the MDF, taking the top layer of the MDF with it. The only way I can see to fix this is put screws all the way through, which I wanted to avoid. I wanted a clean look. Sooo I got to do what I got to do to make this work. No way I want to use just regular oval head screws, I'm thinking allen head screws would look better but not wild about that idea, maybe either small carriage bolts with nuts from the back, paint the heads, or screws from the back with acorn nuts on the front..... So this is a bit of a set back, does not matter how much you plan and try to think things out, situations come up where you need to change something, and I have had a few on this build.
