JustJimAZ

YouTube Science! Part 1 - Musou Black Paint

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Over the weekend, this video from "The Action Lab" was blowing up all the Haunt related pages:


At about $180 per liter, plus shipping from Japan, I guess, it's not something most haunters could do large scale. The author did not mention how much he actually used for that little room, but he had 5 liters to use. Roughly $1,000 in paint alone.

Now, for about $40 you can buy five gallons of flat black paint. Would it block 99.94% of visible light? No, probably not.

HOWEVER... I was thinking about that. reading the manufacturer's web page, Musou shares one drawback with Vantablack. It's fragile. It seems the surface is easily rubbed off. This makes suggests to me that a similar product might be achievable for MUCH less.

Anyone who works in an office with laser printers knows that these things often need toner recharged. Long before ALL the toner is used up, it needs to be replaced. An enterprising haunter might volunteer to handle this job to gain access to those mostly spent cartridges. Some people will try refilling them, BUT if you can open them to refill them, you can also open them and dump them into a gallon size ziplock bag. Sure, toner is super messy, but in a good sized office, I bet you could get a couple gallon of toner in the next 6-10 months.

Even if you just buy the toner 500MG at a time, you could get 5 kilos for less than $150. That's a lot of toner.

Why am I suddenly talking about toner? In my experience, toner is an incredibly black fine powder. MAYBE mixing it into flat black latex paint will make it even darker and flatter. I have a different idea.

This idea involves using a spray gun. Spray the walls flat black. Before that paint is dry, spray the walls with toner. Maybe you'll have to do one wall at a time. I don't know your setup. Still, the toner should stick to the paint, reducing the reflectivity considerably. Even in a completely black room, patrons are not going to touch 80-90% of it. Really, anything below 4 feet and over 6 will probably never get touched. That might not be true if you have a railing or something people touch at about waist height, so in that case, say 3 and 6 feet.

Anything NOT between 3 and 6 feet off the ground is painted black, then blasted with toner. If the toner comes off easily onto hands, simply paint that 3 foot band in the middle with black again.

I'm betting that this would give you a LOT of black space for less than $200.

Why even go through all this? TO me, it would be worth it if some patron with a cell phone light tried to ruin the effect, but it just failed. The light would not bounce off anything except maybe other patrons. How cool would that be? Black means black! Not relatively dark until someone "outsmarts" the haunt and lights it up.

There are probably a LOT of opportunities I don't see yet.

What would you do with such dark paint?

Happy Haunting!

Updated 01-20-2021 at 05:07 PM by JustJimAZ

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