The Ultimate Guide to Paints for Metals

 It’s often that the job of painting metal surfaces is neglected as it’s thought to be a difficult process. While there are a few key factors that need to be considered carefully when painting metals, it’s not as hard as it’s made out to be. In this blog, we’ll take you through a guide on how to use paints for metals. Hopefully, this blog will provide you with a deeper understanding of how to paint your metal surfaces. We’ll share some tips and tricks and discuss different paints for metals to help you avoid issues like a shortened lifespan. 

Clean the surface first

Starting with a clean surface is important and required for every paint job, whether you’re painting your walls or metal surfaces. It may seem like an obvious first step, but it’s often forgotten and needs to be made a priority. You need to make sure that there is no dirt, old paint, rust or grease present on the surface. You can clean the metal using sandpaper or a similar scraping tool that can remove grease, dirt and other deposits from the surface easily. In cases where the grease deposits are heavy and hard to remove, using mineral spirits will help. 

Remove the older peelings and loose paint

Paint remains on a surface for a certain period of time and peels off when it doesn’t have any holding power left. So, when painting your metal, you need to peel away old paint completely. To do this, you can use several manual cleaning methods like wire brushing, sanding, and scraping. Other methods include the use of power cleaning tools that will yield results in no time but beware that they may end up polishing the surface, which can cause problems like adhesion to arise. 

Remove rust

Remove any sort of rust. If you see any rust on a metal surface, it will eventually reduce the adhesiveness of paint which significantly reduces the lifespan of the paint. So, you need to eliminate the rust before you start to apply the metal paint.

There are different methods you can use to eliminate rust. If the rust is light, you can use brushing, sanding or can apply a primer that comes with rust inhibition properties. In cases where you apply paint on the rusted metal, it might peel off. If it doesn’t peel off, the paint may also get rusty. There are other issues as well that you can avoid by removing the rust properly before applying paint.

Apply Primer

No matter what metal surface you are painting, applying primer is one of the most crucial steps that needs to take place. There are different primers available; in certain cases it’s suggested that water bases are not used. Primers that have  rust-inhibition properties, galvanized primers and iron oxide primers are recommended. 

Primer is mainly applied straight after cleaning the surface to avoid any sort of dust, dirt or rust from occurring on the surface. If you do not apply a primer, you may end up decreasing the longevity of the paint and ultimately you will have to repaint the surface sooner than otherwise necessary. This will be costly for you, so you should invest in a quality primer.