painting stainless steel

[Palmetto]

Not exactly garage related, but I need some good advice on painting stainless steel plate......So here goes.....
I am building a house, and have an exposed cedar truss on my front porch. Since we live close to the coast (50 mi.) I decided to make my truss brackets out of S.S. Now that I have them cut out, and holes punched, I need to paint them. I want to paint them black, but I have no idea what kind of paint to use on stainless steel plate.

Any painters out there?

Here are a few pics of the house....

Thanks!
Phillip

 

[buening]

I'm definitely not a professional painter, but if it were me I would use a self-etching primer and then use any color of solvent based paint of your liking. I find that I get better adhesion with self-etching primer over standard primer.

 

[Kevin54]

I would look into powdercoating. If that is not a possibility, look for zinc chromate primer, then a good brand of either automotive enamel or an industrial enamel.

 

[rsanter]

it will take paint just like steel
make sure its clean, use good primer, use good paint

I like the powdercoat idea if you can do it

bob

 

[Palmetto]

Thanks guys!

 

[<>Severed<>]

in the tools thread there is a topic about black oxide and on the caswell site there is some stuff for blacking stainless, not sure if it would work for what your doing but it might be worth checking out.

 

[stinkythings.com]

In my opinon, for long term durability powdercoating is probably your best bet.

 

[rsanter]

a good powdercoat job means you would only have to use plain steel

bob

 

[atvmech]

-Clean with DX-330 (wax and grease remover) it removes all the crud

-sand with 320g paper

-spray PPG DPX171 Self Etching primer

Then paint

This primer works great on metal ive used it on blasted car bodies, racecar chassis', and i used it to paint the chrome plastic grille on my truck, works great...

 

[John Timmins]

Powdercoat using polyester powder. There are many different kinds of powders and this is the kind that passes the "salt spray" tests the best.

Painting stainless steel is tricky. The metal has to be tinned first. When the DeLorean stainless steel cars got smashed up it too a very talented guy to crop out a fender and then weld and grind so that it looked normal. So some bondo got sanded in and then people tried to paint the stainless steel cars. Well that didn't work out too good so the entire car had to be tinned for the paint to stick.

If you paint your stainless you might not be too happy one day so go the powdercoat way. If you are determined to paint remember that the automotive industry does not have the best paints. Use marine products.