Month: June 2022

The trashed ps3 that I bought months ago got a new coat of paint and a new outlook on life as a console. A brief summary of what happened. I saw a very blurry pic of a blue ps3 locally listed for pretty cheap. I thought it would be neat to own a blue ps3 and went to check it out. The house was totally dark and it was difficult to see the console, but they showed it worked. I gave them the money and left. After stepping outside, It was immediately apparent the console wasn’t blue from the factory and was very beat-up. The paint was chipping, it was painted haphazardly, gunk was in the corners instead of paint, scratches were all over, the ps3 logo looked destroyed. But I blamed myself for not being more thorough and just left.

Fast forward a couple months. My son had a bumper he needed to repaint and I suggested we paint the ps3 to match his car. He was a little worried about using paint on the ps3 and running out, but I convinced him it would be fine.

I took apart the ps3 and put the parts into bags, then went about prepping the shell. I sanded off the paint in the larger areas and used various chemicals to try to remove it from some of the more difficult areas. I then taped it up and he sprayed undercoat. He quickly realized that the ps3 was a great piece to practice on before his car parts.

The undercoat was pretty lumpy and I sanded it down ok, but it wasn’t perfectly smooth. Then the base color coat was sprayed. Which I realized is far thinner than I ever imagined. Then some coats of clear coat went on. It ended up pretty orange peely and I sanded the clear coat and tried polishing. This is all new to me and I ended up kind of burning the clear coat, or at least it was very close to burning. The corners went through the clear and color in a couple places, but it’s a ps3, so… not that big a deal.

I think if I were to redo it, I’d hit it again with undercoat before color and get it totally, completely smooth. I stopped sanding because in many places I sanded through the undercoat. Plus, hitting it again with the undercoat would have totally covered all scratches and problems the previous owner had created. We all agree that the color coat alone probably looked the best on the ps3, It looked awesome mat metallic blue and textured, but there’s no way that would last being so delicate. Plus the color coat was too thick and ended up “spitting”. We fixed that problem before painting the car parts, but the ps3 retains that issue. All in all it looks far better than it did before.

Anyway, to the pictures!

Before/after

Before

After