Rattlecan or Dipping for A-TACS Pattern

[Rorik]

Hope this is the correct place to post this, just recently made an account on here after reading for a while.

I am hoping to move on to lever action 1890's Winchesters, but before I do I need to finish up some projects I have. Was curious if anyone has had any experience painting or dipping AR's or ACR's. I have one of the Bushmaster ACR Enhanced 5.56 rifles and I would love to throw a forest A-TACS pattern on it. I know Bushmaster makes them in an A-TACS pattern but I don't like it and would rather do it myself.

Anyways - any suggestions as to whether I should have it professionally dipped (costs around 300$-400$), buy a kit to dip it myself (about 200$) or just rattlecan the bastard with some leaf/chicken wire textures and such.

Here is an example of the pattern for reference (I wan to make it a bit more organic). It makes me extremely nervous to do it myself on a 2800$ rifle, but I'm tempted to.

 

[alex0535]

For a $2800 rifle I would send it off to be done professionally.

I want to get these people to do some camo work for me at some point. you might know of somewhere more local to you, but I was highly impressed with their work. Make a gun disappear in front of you sort of camo.

http://www.customdigitaldesignsonline.com/content/photo-gallery/rifles/semi-automatic.html

I saw a booth at a local gun shop where they had some of their work displayed. These people do some of the best duracoat camouflage work I have ever seen. They do everything from digital camo to your local underbrush. They keep photos of all the work to reference for future stuff. If you look through their gallery and see something you like you could say "I want it to look like that" and they would be able to replicate it.

If you gave them the image you posted and told them you wanted "underbrush" in those colors I think it would look great. Better than you can do yourself, and it will hold up better.

 

[Rorik]

Awesome, thanks for the input. Definitely cool to see examples. I have a problem I am sure most people have who collect firearms or like firearms projects, where I buy a rifle and immediately move on to the next rifle on my list before fully completing the one I have. Built a pretty generic AR with magpul accessories and no optics or attachments and kept telling myself "I need to set some money aside for some nice optics and a flashlight attachment, quad rail, etc." Then while looking for these things online I start to wander into the firearms sections on the websites I used to look for accessories and its suddenly "Oh, look at this shiny new 1911" and the money for accessories for the AR immediately goes to a new gun. Its a vicious cycle haha.

So, ramblings aside, I have wanted to have this ACR done for a while and have a matching pattern done on my Sig P220. I like the satisfaction of a DIY job, but I can't argue with you, when it comes to 2 firearms totaling almost 4 grand in cost, it is probably best to have it done professionally.