Progressive Distributor - Making proper paint recommendations

Making proper paint recommendations

A maintenance man from one of your best customers recently repaired a faulty hose on a production machine. After cleaning up the oil and grease drips, he noticed some discoloration on the side of the machine. After further examination, he also detected some rust spots and peeling paint on 15 other machines in the plant, so he decided it’s time for a fresh coat of paint on all of the production equipment.

He comes to you looking for help. What advice would you give him?

That’s the kind of question commonly posed to distributor salespeople. For an answer, we contacted Peter Fisher, a senior technical representative for Rust-Oleum. Here’s Fisher’s advice:

Surface preparation
Wash all surface areas with detergent and water to remove all grease, oil, dirt and other contaminants. Rinse thoroughly and allow to dry.

Use a scraper or wire brush to remove all loose rust and deteriorated previous coating. Feather-edge sanding around rusted or peeled areas will improve the final appearance, but is not required. If the remaining previous coating has a hard glossy finish, it should be scarified with a fine grit sand paper to optimize adhesion of the new coating.

Spot-prime rusted areas or areas where the coating has peeled away to the metal with the appropriate rust-inhibitive primer. If maximum corrosion protection is desired, a full coat of primer should also be applied before applying the selected finish coat.

Coating selection
There are a number of different types of coating systems which could be used in the described situation. My first recommendation would be a two-component, water-based epoxy. This type of coating provides a high- performance finish that resists the general abuse and exposure to oils and fluids commonly used in a production facility.

A two-component coating consists of two parts, generally the base component and the activator, that must be mixed together before applying the coating. Most coating manufacturers package the two parts in convenient one-to-one mixing ratios. You simply measure out equal volumes. Or, they’ll package it in such a way that when you mix the entire contents of both cans, you’ll have the right mixture.

The advantage of the epoxy is that it resists various types of fluids. With any type of machinery, oils or fluids may leak on the machine, whether it’s cutting fluids in a machine shop or some type of lubricating oil on another production machine. Epoxy coatings are extremely tough, durable and highly resistant to chemicals, abrasion, moisture and alcohol.

Questions to ask
As a salesperson, what’s one of the most important things you should do before answering a customer’s question about which product to use? Ask additional questions yourself.

That advice from Peter Fisher, senior technical representative from Rust-Oleum, can help a salesperson make a recommendation that will prompt a customer to want to keep coming back to you for solutions.

Some questions to ask end-users include: What is the condition of the substrate being painted? Is it heavily rusted? What’s the normal working environment like? Will it be exposed to solvents? Will it be exposed to physical abuse?

Some equipment gets hit by hand carts or forklifts or is regularly exposed to oils, grease or other chemicals. In that case, a tough epoxy is more likely to stand up to the test of time than an acrylic or alkyd product.

One of the most important considerations, according to Fisher, is environment. It’s critical to know the normal conditions surrounding the surface being painted.

“If a distributor salesman walks into a processing area when the plant is on shutdown, he may make an assessment of conditions that might be totally different from when the plant is operating,” Fisher says. “I’ve been in food processing plants where the structural steel along the ceiling is rusting away because, during operation, the entire ceiling is hidden in a mist of steam. So it’s critical to make sure that before you make a recommendation, you have an understanding of the plant’s normal operating conditions.”

Most quality water-based epoxy systems consist of rust-inhibitive primers and finish colors. A major benefit of a water-based coating is the absence of solvent fumes and odors which are not only an annoyance, but also a hazard. These coatings can be applied by brush, roller or spray.

The reason you’d want to use a water-based epoxy is the friendliness of it. It doesn’t have a strong solvent smell normally associated with solvent-based epoxies. As long as you don’t have a problem with getting the surface clean, they’ll work well.

As with any water-based coating, epoxy use is limited when there’s a possibility of oil or grease contamination that you can’t get off the surface. If you have a machine that’s extremely oily and there’s no way to clean all the oil off before you paint it, then a water-based product probably would not be a good choice. You’d probably have to go to a solvent-based coating. Some offer better performance, such as two-component polyurethanes. Some, like water-based acrylics or alkyds, provide less performance.

The industry has high-solid epoxies that can be applied in a single coat in less severe environments. Some of these coatings are referred to as epoxy mastics or high-solid epoxies that can be applied with minimal surface preparation.