UKH

One for the UKC knowledge base

I'm having to diy the whole of my furnture as mostly i can't make fit anythng off-the shelf. I'm trying to achieve a melamine/HPL like finish. Laminated mdf is out because of humidity/stability reasons. Laminated ply is out because it's hideously expensive, and laminating the finished boards myself is also out due to it costing even more than laminated ply.

So it's looking like painted ply is the most likely option, but i'm at a loss for how to achieve anything like it with today's paint that don't kill you anymore.

Tried everything that can be bought in store and nothing quite works. It always feels like painted ply, which marks and scratches and so not suitable for shelves, doors or cabinets where things are dragged, handled, touched, scuffed, etc. Clearcoated paint just looks like clearcoated paint. Eggshell finishes are still too soft and easily marked with a fingernail.

Already tried variations of filing the grain, plenty sanding, different primers with different top coats and different varnishes and clear coats.

So i'm at the point anything i'll try needs to be ordered online and would be good to have an idea of what to shoot for rather than throwing money to the wind.

Alkyd enamels or PU paints sound like could fit the bill. Anyone got experience with those? Or any other sugestions?

FWIW, i got several chunks of furniture i've fished off skips for reference which have exactly the finish i'm after, so it exists, just haven't managed to replicate it.

Thanks

Rustoleum can be painted on wood and gives a hard finish, can be made almost to a mirror finish if you take the time. My mum used a tin I had left over to paint a garden table, and after several years of sitting in the garden in all weathers it looks pretty much the same as the day it was on painted.

I've tried all the rustoleum flavours and none of them feels quite good enough.They do have a 'kitchen cupboard' paint I haven't tried as couldn't find it in store, but their 'furniture paint' hasn't been great so not sure it warrants ordering online to test.

Thanks though 

Epoxy? I'm sure you'd find some 2 part boat paint but for white you could just mix up thin epoxy and gellcoat pigment.

Jk

It's horrendously expensive and not suitable for 'small' jobs as you got to mix the whole tin and anything unused becomes wastage after a couple of hours.

I do have loads of epoxy that I tried clear coating with, but unless you got the 'workshop'* conditions have to be perfect for it to achieve a good finish.

*(Which I don't have)

Five months ago i painted our kitchen cupboards with this stuff - not one scratch so far. Had to go to to a Dulux place for it, where they told me the stuff labeled as ‘trade’ in places like BnQ is rubbish compared to proper ‘trade’. 

It sounds like what you are running up against is the inevitability of getting what you pay for. If you want a real bullet-proof finish (as opposed to an advertising executive's definition of it), you probably need to pay quite a lot of money for something like epoxy.

Mmmh, not really. There's got to be a paint that isn't a gorified vinyl emulsion on a different tin but without going the whole industrial 2 pak paints that cost £50 a litre,

The bits i got here which are painted MDF are just that, and definitely arent painted with epoxy. Just don;t knpw what they are painted with. haha

Yeah thanks. I tried all version of dulux. (And Zinsser, Sandolin, Ronseal, Cuprinol, Rustoleum, most own brands and whatever else i might be forgetting). Some are better than others but ultimately they are all much the same thing with some variations

I'm more wondering if anyone has experience with the less 'high street' types of paint rather than brands.

Have you tried polyester flowcoat/topcoat instead of epoxy?  You might find that's easier to work with.   Though you probably wouldn't get the finish you're looking for without sanding and polishing it afterwards.

Not a bad call, but the process would be a bit too much for the purpose to apply it onto bare wood.

Besides, with flowcoat the way to get the edges cured and with the right film thickness is to paint before cutting it, which is not great as i'd prefer to paint the 'bits' after cutting and dry fit them twhen i know it all fits together.

Thanks though

Helpful, or maybe not...

I get excellent results for a bullet proof ultra smooth finish on wood with an oil based paint on top of what the French call "enduit gras à laquer".

Sorry, I haven't found a satisfactory translation. It comes in a small tub, looks like goopy toothpaste, and acts like an ultra -fine filler. When I've finished sanding the wood to glass, I'll put a layer of this on it, then sand again with 300 grit paper just to get a slight key for the paint. Then paint with a roller for laquer paint.

Maybe other Francophiles have an idea for an English name for this handy goo?

How much do you want to paint, what's your budget and how much time are you willing to put in to it? I built a sailing dinghy about five years ago which has a wood ply/epoxy construction with the final hull being painted on what was a surface ranging from pure wood to pure (sanded) epoxy/glass surfaces. The result was very satisfying, smooth, glossy and hard using mid-market boat paints. There was no short-cut though, it was lots and lots of coats (>10 IIRC), of slowly increasing paint to thinner ratio, over an appropriate undercoat, and you can still tell it was painted with a brush. 

To be honest, I would probably opt for painting the thing with epoxy (without pigment), then sanding so you have a very smooth, hard surface, and then whatever you paint on top will give you better results. Epoxy was not cheap, but it wasn't that expensive, and I would explicitly recommend NOT mixing it all up in one go unless you want to have a container of hot, fuming, chain reacting epoxy on your hands! I speak from experience, despite understanding epoxies and their reactions, it still handles in a counter-intuitive sense.  Of course, a slower hardener would have helped in that regard too. To get the smoothest finish (i.e. without any brush strokes) is probably going to require spraying the final coat at least. 

All sugestions/tips are helpful

I got a similar process where i heat up a 2 part filler to make it near enough liquid before mixing it, which works really well to then sand it to a perfectly smooth homogenous surface.

Not sure i've tried an oil based wood filler other than puttys but i found "gras à laquer" sold online over here, so will get some have a play as it sounds pretty good.

The topcoat is what is baffling me at the moment, as you can't buy proper old school oil paints due to a change in regulations few years ago, so everything has been reformulated and not quite what it used to be. The rest are now considered 'specialist' and only available through some specialist shops.

It was an EU regulation so you probably have a really good paint supplier !

Thanks

 

If i'm honest i got everythng here i'd need to do it with epoxy (about 20kgs of it, more additives than you can shake a stick at and 3 different 'speeds' of hardeners) but despite it being overkill for painting a cupboard, that just wouldn't work, as the moment you put epoxy on it then you can only paint over it wth epoxy paint. Nothing else will stick to it.

That and sanding epoxy is not ideal for a smooth finish as it sets too hard. You'd have to mix it with microballoons or a lightweight fairing compound if planning to sand it. The standard way is to do the base coats with polyester resin and then topcoat it with epoxy for the best finish. Maybe using an epoxy primer underneath if you want to go for the baliistic approach

Ah, and if you want to avoid epoxy lollipops it's all a function of the depth/fill of the resin in the container. If you need to knock out a bigger amount of resin, what you do is instead of filling up higher, you get a wider receptacle for it. Paint roller trays are perfect to decant it on soon as you mix it and prevent it going exothermic, and using a roller to paint or apply the epoxy also prevents brush marks. You only have to use a brush if you are using flowcoat to allow wax retention.

Thanks though, appreciate it. And well done building a dinghy from scratch! That's awesome

Have you tried coach enamels?

I've used craftmaster paints on a few projects, takes a bit of practice to get the finish right and it'll need a few coats.

A couple of thoughts, how long are you leaving the paint to dry, it can take a few weeks for some paints to fully harden off, and how hard is the wood, timber and plywoods are very soft these days, fast growing high moisture content etc. 

20kg should be plenty for a cupboard - for reference, my dinghy is certainty small, but I needed less than 5kg of resin for the whole thing! And when you say epoxy paint, do you mean 2k? Because I certainly didn't use that for paint or for varnish and haven't had any adhesion problems so far (touch epoxy soaked wood)...

Again, not really a problem I came across. On the hull it was epoxy on wood, epoxy + glass fibre tape, and epoxy filled with some microfibres used as filler in various places. Sanding worked fine and gave a good finish, albeit after getting through a lot of sanding discs until I discovered Abranet.

An excellent tip, and obvious when you think about it - it only happened to me the once! It's the whole spread-it-over-a-wide-surface-to-keep-it-liquid-for-longer thing that is the counter intuitive bit I meant. I preferred brushes as it helped me work the epoxy into the fibre tapes, and because I was sanding afterwards

Cheers! Here's a couple of pictures of her:

Just to add, it seems like HPL, Trespa or laminate coated ply is what you really need, but you've already discounted that on price. How much is your time worth? Whatever paint system you use its going to cost in time and materials.

P. S. You probably already know but epoxy doesn't do well in UV light, in sunlit areas it'll need a UV blocking clearcoat, even the uv inhibited stuff. I used to use Epifanes which gives a hard finish. 

Our kitchen cabinets came painted from the factory, but we needed to paint some other custom made bits. DIY kitchens happily supplied us some paint - sounds exactly what you need.

iirc it was about £30/L and needs to be sprayed. Sadly I can't rememeber the brand name, could look it up in a couple of weeks when I'm home. 

I've not looked hard, but not found anything similar. We just painted our bookcases with Velspar, certainly not a "melamine" finish but it does seem to harden up over time.

Don't forget - touch dry is not fully cured

Not yet, on wood at least. Done plenty of painting metal with enamel and it's one of the types of paint i think it 'might' work.

I'm good with getting a perfect finish with them. If you use foam brushes it's almost like cheatng

I've been testing paints for over a year and got heaps of pieces of wood all around the place with paintd swatches on them so not so much an issue of curing times with the ones i tested.

And yes ypu are right, a soft wood will feel soft after painting, but the kind of paints i got in mind are the ones that set thick and hard, and chip in chunks rather than peeling or scratching. If you ever tried stripping an old wardrobe door you know what i mean, haha. Maybe i shoud bechecking people's sheds rather than shops.

My time is worth a lot less than £250 a sheet i can tell you that, haha.

That's a beautiful boat. Good job.

I have had the resin cooking itself loads of times, haha. Normally when not replacing the mixing jars often enough and pouring new resin onto one that had already started heating up.

It's more intuitive when you look into how epoxy cures. It doesn't need air, oxygen or humidity, it's fully anaerobic. In fact when laminating the profesional way it gets vacuum bagged. It's a self-contained chemical reaction which produces, and then gets 'fuelled' by, heat.

So when poured deep the whole lot warms up slightly, and the resin itself works as an insulator. The resin at the centre cannot 'cool down' and starts heating more and more until it crosses a threshold that it starts an uncontrolled chain reaction reaching a couple of hundred degrees. Amussing to watch it happen if you mix it on a plastic beer pint glass.

If you are quick you can put a mixing stick inside and pull out the heart pretty much solidified before the heat reaches the cup and melts it, and you end up with an epoxy lollipop on a stick, haha

Not a paint reconmendation, but you could try adding some Floetrol additive to your chosen paint.  It helps reduce/remove brush strokes, and gives a smoother finish to your painting.

Also for a better finish look at a paint sprayer rather than brushing.

I’m a bit baffled by this thread. It’s years since I’ve done any of this stuff, but isn’t it just a case of using several coats of sanding sealer, combined with wet and dry sandpaper used wet (with detergent or a bit of soap), starting off with about 100 grade and working up to about 400 or even finer, when sanding the top coats of polyurethane or whatever? The finish then should end up virtually like glass. I used to use a brush, not spray, but the latter is almost certainly even better.

Sanding is a bore, better brush technique gets you near perfect finish, as good as some production car spray jobs. 

Change in regulations. Good old oil paints that cure hard as nails don't exist anymore.

Linseed oil paints are readily available. Patience is a virtue.

One-component PU yacht paints are good especially for the hobby builder, they brush (roller or pads are the answer) out quite well and shrink back nicely. Harder than any normal paint including any oil-based.

Two-component linear PU is the best but a bit harder to apply manually, buy a full-on respirator and preferably spray. Sterling and Awlgrip are the favoured yacht builders paints on epoxy primers, International make one as well.

Our hull finishers calculated 50hrs/m² for fill, fair, prime and topcoat, just for a sheet of ply where the first two steps are omitted 10 to 20hrs/m² is probably reasonable.

The last yacht I had any involvement with the interior we just took the ply to a local furniture maker and got it laminated.

In reply to jimtitt:

Didn't know linseed oil paints were a thing. I'll look them up*

*(I just did. Apparently mildew loves it, and it goes rancid. Maybe not the best thing to paint all interior furniture with...)

Now we are talking. I'll see if i can get my hands on some give it a try.

Done a fair bit of work applying 2 pac coatings so know the score. Just don't want to use 2 part paints due to the wastage when painting relatively small surfaces.

Probably 2 hours of work and 48 hours of waiting for things to dry. Hope they didn't charge you for the lot.

I can laminate myself, but at 150 odd quid a sheet that's the equivalent of £300 for a double sided sheet of ply, plus the cost of the ply, glue, and elbow grease. Ain't gonna happen

Thanks Jim

Thanks! I only wish I were able to sail her more, but kids have enforced a hiatus. 

You are of course bang-on with your description of epoxy curing, but I still find it counter intuitive when I've got a paintbrush in my hand. Anything else (paint, glues like PVA, Cascamite etc.), keep it together in a pot with a small surface area as long as possible to keep it workable, the places where you paint it on thinly will dry quickest. It's been instinct since painting as a kid.  Epoxy is exactly backwards, the bits painted thinly will still be curing long after what was left over in your pot has gone hard - or turned into your own little Three Mile Island if you haven't noticed in time!