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Our washing machines and dryers were never top of the line nor the least expensive. Mom always selected middle of the road appliances. I would like to see a porcelain top washer some time to see what the difference is.
 
Porcelain is much more wear and scratch resistant than painted metal, although if you drop something hard on it, it can chip.
 
When I went through the HA806 for my parents, I had the cabinet repainted using automotive paint. Since you can't really buy harvest gold paint off the shelf anywhere, I took the front panel with me to the Sherwin Williams Automotive Paint Store and had them match it. They did a great job. I purchased one quart of paint, and the total cost for the paint, the hardener, and the reducer was right around one hundred dollars. Then, I took the cabinet and paint to a body shop I've dealt with in the past and left it with them to paint whenever it was convenient for them. Several weeks and another fifty dollars later I picked it up looking like a new cabinet.

 

Here it is just after being delivered to my parents house. All fittings, including the data plate, were removed prior to painting.

d-jones++1-3-2013-02-24-41.jpg
 
Rinso,

Ok, I know what you mean then. Our '68 GE drop in range had a porcelain top. The finish is better looking. I remember the rounded edges or sides of the cook surface. Had to be porcelain. Thanks.
 
Question for the group

I have a 1952 Frigidair Refrigerator I purchased last year and it needs a paint job. I may see if the local high school can do it but did I not see a thread where someone painted an appliance themselves? Also what's the best way to polish the chrome pieces? I was thinking of using an automotive technique for the chrome which would involve buffing.

jamman_98
Joe
 
Joe, in professional shops enamel paint is baked after it's applied. Not many people have provisions for this at home, but the heating is required for any kind of long-term durability.
 
Well it looks more difficult than I thought.... I guess I will have to ask to a car paint shop ... my filter-flo have porcelain top, not the lid though.
Actually the filter flo  just got very light  scratches on the painted lid and body,  the porcelain top  got two small chips, unfortunately putting it upside down when I replaced the oil seal got them hitting the floor,  I fixed it with a touch up product.

So a painting on porcelain would result bad?
Anyway for the fridge if parts have to be baked of course  most of the people can't do that theirself.
 
Freddy

In looking over your posts above, I see that you have access to a farm and compressors, so you should be able to do this yourself. Not that a farm is needed, it just means you likely have the space you need to do this properly. Furthermore, it isn't necessary to bake the cabinet in an oven or even sit it in front of heat lamps as long as you use an enamel with a hardener added to it. These are often referred to as catalyzed enamels, and the catalyst, or hardener if you will, ensures that the paint hardens all the way through.

 

To reduce the risk of runs and sags you'll also want to use a descent spray gun capable of producing an even spray pattern. Make sure that the hose you connect to this spray gun hasn't been used with an oiler for air tools at any time, as oil in the paint will ruin it. In fact, if you have any doubts about the history of the hose you'll be using, buy another one. They aren't all that expensive so why take chances.

 

Make sure you have a water trap at both ends of the hose. A large one on the tank side will catch most of it, a smaller one at the spray gun hose fitting should get the rest.

 

A pressure regulator at the gun is also helpful, as pressure drop though the hose is always an issue. The longer the hose, the greater the drop, especially with smaller diameter hoses. All of the spray guns I've ever used have a minimum required pressure at the gun to ensure proper atomization of the paint. So set your tank regulator above what you need, and then use the regulator at the gun to make your final adjustments.

 

Spend more time prepping the surface of your cabinet before you start painting. Very often the difference between a great job and a poor job is found in the prep. Feather out your chips and scratches and use primer surfacers where needed. You want your surface to be smooth and defect free prior to applying any paint.

 

You'll want to buy a bit more paint than you'll need so that you can practice on something unimportant before you actually paint your cabinet. Painting can be a bit tricky until you figure things out. If you apply it too dry(meaning not enough paint applied at once), it won't flow out properly and your finish will be rough and textured like an orange peel, a condition that's even referred to as 'orange peel'. Apply it too wet and you'll end up with runs and sags. When spraying your practice piece, pay attention to what the paint surface looked like just before a run or sag formed. Then you'll be able to avoid them better when you spray your cabinet. If you do end up with a small run or sag, don't panic. Let the paint dry thoroughly and then you can glue some fine wet sand paper to a small flat block. You can then use this block, along with water, to sand the top off the defect until it's the same height as the surrounding paint. Then polish it out to bring the shine back.

 

In spite of what others have done, I would personally not paint over porcelain enamel unless it was badly scared and chipped up. Scars, like chips and deep scratches, can be touched up rather effectively  with paint as long as you have a really good color match. It requires patience though, as you'll need to build up several layers of paint, letting each one dry in turn until you've built it up above the level of the surrounding porcelain. Then using a small flat sanding block as described above, sand the touch up paint back down to the the level of the porcelain. By applying plastic tape to the surface of the sand paper at both ends of your block, you can get enough height at the center to keep the paper from sanding the porcelain. Then as mentioned above, use a polishing compound to bring the shine back. Done properly your touch up will be difficult for most people to spot.

 

Painting isn't easy, but it's a worthwhile skill to have. Nevertheless, after reading all of this, you may very well decide to have a body shop do the painting for you. If you're only planing to paint one cabinet it may even be cheaper for you. But if you think you're going to be painting multiple cabinets(or cars) in the future, the investment you make in equipment now and the time you spend learning, can save you money in the long run.
 
> Furthermore, it isn't necessary to bake the cabinet in an oven or even sit it in front of heat lamps as long as you use an enamel with a hardener added to it. <

Nice theory, but untrue. If it was, you can bet major appliance (or auto etc) manufacturers wouldn't spring for the extra cost. It's "good enough" if all you ever do is look at your appliances.
 
Sorry Jeff, but I think you're mistaken

Baking is a method used by manufacturers to force dry the paint. The cost of those ovens is reduced to virtually nothing when you consider the shear volume of autos passing through them. Catalyzed enamels are much more expensive than non catalyzed, so costs would rise with their use. On the other hand, body shops make use of catalyzed enamels because you can't put an assembled auto in the oven without doing serious damage to all the rubber and plastics. This is true for appliance manufacturers as well. It's less expensive to build an oven and pass thousands of cabinets through it than it is to pay for catalyzed enamels for those same cabinets. It all comes down to scale. So unless Freddy, or anyone else for that matter, has access to an oven large enough to stick a washing machine cabinet in, the best we can do is catalyzed enamels. Just plain old heat lamps on a stand won't make the paint any harder. They just speed up the drying process. So if you aren't in a hurry you can do without them.
 
It's a riot reading this while staring at our W&D pair: a Speed Queen washer with a heat-cured porcelain finish sitting next to our crap Whirlpool Cabrio dryer (with a cheaper enamel finish). The pair are the exact same age, and the washer still looks brand new. The dryer, meanwhile, is a dulled mess of surface scratches and paint nicks. You can literally take your fingernail and shave the paint off the surface. Even our flipping laundry baskets scratched right through it.

Absolute junk imo. Heat is not used to "dry" enamel, it's used to cure it. Simply stated it's impossible to replace heat with hardeners or otherwise chemically.
 
Modern urethane two-part or catalyzed paints cure through a chemical process not through evaporation of solvents (like lacquer paints do) so do not need heat to cure. However, it is important that both the air temperature and temperature of the items being painted are within the limits specified by the paint manufacturer. To accommodate various temperature ranges paint manufacturers offer reducers and hardeners in different ranges so an experienced painter can select his paint chemicals to work properly in his environment on the day he will be painting.

 

Manufacturers like heated paint booths for several reasons but one is that they must have consistent conditions throughout the year for painting or they'd have to adjust paint mixtures constantly to accommodate changing temperatures. The paint is applied to bare panels by robots and is formulated for this and the temperatures in the booths. It's a much quicker process than painting by hand, another reason manufacturers like it.

 

One distinction to be aware of is that the terms "two-pack" or "catalyzed" refer to the use of a hardener to provide the chemical reaction that makes the paint cure and shouldn't be confused with the terms "single stage" and "basecoat-clearcoat". Single stage paint is a topcoat that once applied over primer becomes the final surface, although more than one coat is usually needed to get proper coverage. With a basecoat-clearcoat system the basecoat is applied over the primer first, then after a short time a clearcoat is applied over that. In this case the basecoat does nothing more than give color and make things pretty while the clearcoat provides the shine and durability. This allows water-borne basecoats to be used (though not all basecoats are such), while the clearcoat will be a catalyzed paint. Basecoat-clearcoat is used for pretty much all cars today as it works much, much better with metallic paints used on the majority of cars. For a non-metallic paint a single stage is simpler to apply and easier to repair if damaged.

 

One thing that must be remembered: catalyzed urethane paints contain isocyanates. They aren't good for you and proper precautions must be taken by the painter to protect himself.

 

Link below is to a very good website for painting cars but most of the paint information should apply to appliances as well. Painting may not be rocket science but it's pretty sophisticated and there are lots of ways to do it so you can't study too much. And Freddy, while most of the paint guns discussed on the site are either American (deVilbiss & Sharpe), Japanese (Iwata) or German (Sata), Asturo makes some very good guns in Italy. Asturos aren't common here in the US as they aren't widely distributed but should be easily available to you.

 

 
<a name="start_44150.651156">It's a riot reading this while staring at our W&D pair: a Speed Queen washer with a heat-cured porcelain finish sitting next to our crap Whirlpool Cabrio dryer (with a cheaper enamel finish).</a>
 
<strong>Jeff - Nobody is going to argue that baked on enamel paint is as hard or durable as baked on enamel porcelain. The two products aren't even remotely similar. Freddy was asking about painting, so that's what's being discussed. Furthermore, facilities willing to re-fire a porcelain appliance top are not easy to find. You'd likely have to ship your top away someplace to have it done. Then there are other issues to contend with. There's a shop down the street from me here that restores and sells old stoves. They have their own oven(kiln is more accurate) for baking on porcelain, and they cautioned me that the current crop of colors available are very limited, so matching anything is out of the question, and that the very high temperatures involved risk warping the panel. In other words, they said don't risk it. The bottom line is that I'm talking about paint(apples) and you've launched into a discussion about porcelain(oranges) without telling anyone.

But since you seem to have had the impression that I was talking about porcelain rather than paint, why did you bring up the auto industry? I've never heard of porcelain being used anywhere on a car.
 
> But since you seem to have had the impression that I was talking about porcelain rather than paint, why did you bring up the auto industry? I've never heard of porcelain being used anywhere on a car. <

I raised the point that manufacturers in general use heat-cured enamels, regardless of application, when durability is important. I think you and maybe others misunderstood my initial response in this thread. I was referring to porcelain enamel. When I say professional shops I'm talking places with kilns, not Joe's Auto Shop with a set of heatlamps.
 
I hate to wade into this, but baking re-finish paint is just a marketing gimmick.

Real "baked" paint is used in the manufacture of new cars (and appliances). The paint used is a different formulation than anything available to the general public. It contains few VOCs, and higher amounts of solids. It's baked at temperatures higher than could be withstood by plastic/rubber/etc., so the car must be a "body-in-white" (sheetmetal only).

The good news is, re-finish paints (cured/catalyzed with chemical heat as explained above) are better than ever. I've repainted numerous cars using catalyzed urethane and after years of outside exposure, they look as good as new. I painted my '64 Kenmore fridge about 15 years ago with simple enamel, and it looks fine.

I've worked in the auto industry for 20 years, and have been painting cars since I was 15. I also wouldn't consider paint as an alternative for porcelain.
 
Eugene, try http://www.customceramic.com/services.htm, http://www.porcelainenamel.com or ask local professional restorers who they use for reenameling. We've used this company here in Calif. with great success:
[this post was last edited: 1/7/2013-14:45]

 

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