Painting welds - paint recommendations?

The obvious choice would be zinc primer, of Finnegans but I wondered whether anyone had any better suggestions for trying to protect welds from the elements..

A while ago I saw a fully seam welded car in the process and it had an off-white, yellowy primer on it - sound familiar? Anything special?

Cheers,
Chris
Edited by: Chris Eyre

 

Acid Etch Primer, then Regular 2K Primer, then top Coat


The yellow stuff you seen will likely be jus standard 2K primer

 

Do you have any brand names, or places where I can find the paints? Cheers.

 

Well 2K is 2-pack paint, so you will need spray equipment to use it, can be bought from large motor factors/body shop supplies places.

For etch primer you can buy aersol stuff for doing spot areas, I use Upol-Acid8 usually. Or if its a large area you can buy 2pack types aswell.

 

I suppose I'm really just looking for something in a can or tin which can be sprayed / brushed after welds have cooled, rather than leave them exposed overnight to moisture etc

 

Aerosol etch primer will do the job Chris, as Andy says.

 

Ah well just regular acid etch primer and then grey primer out of a can will do the trick if its in the short term before it gets properly painted.

Or indeed your zinc primer.

 

You can brush paint 2 pack quite happily, I've done this lots of times
for this kind of stuff. - floorpans, out of the way areas etc.

 

yeah you can brush etch/2k

ive been using www.rustbullet.com paint on mine, dries really hard

 

When I did my battery tray replacement, I used a combination of weld-through and acid etch primer initially and then I went over the whole lot with POR15 rust preventative paint (bloody good stuff). Then I used that seam sealer stuff - grey stripe or whatever it's called.

 

What about Wax Oil?

 

If the welds are neat then etch primer will be fine. But if there a bit like pidgen siht and just sitting in top then the primer will not be able to get into and around all the weld and after about 2 months normaly once you have gave it a nice coat of body colour ull see the dreaded orange colour around the weld . Best to prime them,seal seam them then prime over that again.


The worst of it is normaly when your stiching an engine bay and you come up against that bit of seam sealer that you thouhgt you would be able to weld through!
Edited by: FaTT mk1

 

Cheers guys - plenty there to think on.

 

Where does this Upol Acid stuff turn up guys?

Haven't fallen over a can of it on my rounds yet...

 

Frost and Halfords.

Edit: Can't find the acid etch stuff on the Frost site actually so I could be wrong. But I bought my cans of the stuff from Halfords.
Edited by: Trev16v

 

Definitely seam sealer it, as it cam out of the factory. You`ll get a massive tin for 10 to 20.