Chrome paint: Where/What to buy?

[gavs]

spiff, it's interesting that you are looking at "chrome" painting as we were looking into it here at work for a display piece.

To answer some of your queries:

Water-based paint don't generally wash off that easily, depending on their application. Water based exterior house paint are a good example, but if you are wanting to use a paint used on plastic models, then you might be playing with fire, or water in this case.

External automotive plastic generally a a PPE material with a combination of talc, EPDM fillers and UV stabilisers. They don't use ABS externally as it is generally a more brittle plastic, not good when it comes to the european (especially Italian) way of parallel parking.

Paints will generally need a specific primer for different plastics. We use 3 different ones that I know of here at work, one for ASA which is almost like a pure solvent, another for urethane and another for ABS. If you are buying a paint that is intended for a specific purpose, it will generally have a specific solvent mixed into it to promote surface etching and adhesion of the paint. Lexan is just a brand name for polycarbonate, which is similar in properties to Acrylic. Acrylic is notoriously poor for anything requiring adhesion, whether it be paint or glue, hence the use of specific primers, polycarbonate isn't quite as bad.


There is a method of painting a "chrome" finish but it is labour intensive and still doesn't look quite as good as chrome and it will never match the chrome plating on your grill insert. You can get plastics plated, it's very similar to chrome plating on metal, generally though due to the hazourdous substances involved, it's no longer used in the OE automotive market, due to RoHS and SOC Free regulations in europe. Nowadays they use a vacuum metalising process whigh uses a vacuum charge along with static electricity to bond the metalic element to the charged surface of the plastic, it's safer, looks good but is bloody expensive and as far as my research into plastic plating goes, nobody on the east cost of Australia does it, i'm not sure about over your way though.

My advice would be that if you are going to paint a "chrome" finish, then also sand back the insert on your jetta grill and paint that too so it looks the same.

[spiff]

Thanks gavs. That made sense - in a general way - but I'm still left clueless about the application of Alclad II Chrome for Lexan to this trim now, as I can't even be sure it's ABS according to what you say.

I don't know if applying this chrome paint + then a layer of waterbased black paint will hold up, or if I should try a product called Killer Chrome that retails for about A$200+ or USD$115 that is meant for automotive use.

There's nobody here in WA that does chroming for plastics. I've tried quite a number of the places in the yellow pages. The ones I found on the web were in the East coast (Melb and Syd) and both quotes I got were well above what I'd want to pay to chrome this trim - $500 - $1200.

One is The Bronzing Studio. The other is Chrometech. A place here that sells aftermarket bodykits told me an automag recently had a feature about a car and they had chromed plastic pieces from the East Coast but he couldn't remember the mag.

[woosh73]

http://www.eastwood.com. , i've bought a few products from there , just recently glass polish to remove scratches.

I'm looking into their powder coating stuff

[Spyda]

Why dont you paint it black to match the grill instead of painting it chrome to match the face?

[spiff]

Why dont you paint it black to match the grill instead of painting it chrome to match the face?

I've actually sanded it back, so when I get my car back, I might put it on just to have a look. I don't think it makes that much of a difference, but to have the accent of chrome might be better imo.

I found out that parts4euro.com actually sells the mkv gti grill with chrome trim (or entirely in chrome - ha ha) for 99.99 usd. Combined with the uncertainties of spraypaint chrome and the durability, maybe that might be the way to go.