Painting Mixmasters, or anything else that's small and m
To do this properly you'd first want to fully disassemble the Mixmaster. Then I'd sandblast or beadblast all traces of the old finish off and make sure no oily residues of any kind remain. Now you can spay paint the body with any color you'd like, and Rustoleum, Krylon, or any other similar product will work fine. The next step is key. Take the sprayed parts and place them in the oven, set the temp to about 250 degrees, and let it bake for a couple of hours. When you're done baking it dry take it out and run some cold tap water over it.(from the faucet, not ice water) At this point you'll have a very hard finish on the paint that goes all the way through to the base. It'll chip if you're careless and bang it around, but it won't scratch easily. There's a seller on eBay that sells reproduction decals for them, so this would be the time to apply one. Then you can clear coat it to seal the decal down. At this point I'd want to put it back in the oven to bake the clear coat, but having never used this method on anything with a decal applied to it I'd first do some experimenting baking clear coated decals to see if they can take the heat.
I've used this method many times on small painted items(electric fans, desk lamps and such)with excellent results. Now I've got a Mixmaster Junior in desperate need of a paint job that I've been looking forward to using it on, so hopefully I'll discover that a clear coated decal withstands the baking just fine, but we'll see. It may turn out that the clear coated decal can't be baked, in which case I'd apply the clear coat to the decal only and leave it at that.
