Black paint for chrome bodies

Powder coat is a thick finish.

My tip, don't do it. You won't get the camera back together without scraping/sanding/filing nor see any of the engravings.

I had a FM2 top coated when my brother had a mini bike rim set done. It was a test top I use for stripping and paint. I strongly recommend you do more research on the topic you may come to a similar conclusion.

It is healthy to dream!
 
Powder coating will not adhere to chrome anyway, pretty much nothing does. If you want to paint it you'll need to strip the chrome first. As pointed out above, you need a thin layer (the chrome is only microns thick) if you're to avoid reassembly problems.
 
I wonder whether the product named below would work - it claims to be able to allow you to paint on glass and tiles. It is applied first and then the topcoat color coat is applied. It soes not add anything dimensionally. It comes in brush on and spray on versions.

Years ago my ex wife used it when painting a wall that had been painted in orange gloss paint (yuk) in an old house were were renovating and and I recall it working perfectly well for that purpose. I have recently bought some more for other purposes but not yet tried it again for those items and certainly not on cameras - but it may work. There is at least one other product (I forget its name and do not have time to go searching ) which does the same and both are generally available at good hardware outlets. They may be worth a try at least on a test subject.

I am also aware of a guy I knew who was a Dentist who used a kind of micro sand blaster that he had for dental purposes (to roughen tooth surfaces when applying crowns etc) to roughen shiny chrome surfaces - he used it to hide rub marks on Leica bodies and claimed good success. Something of this sort might help prepare a surface for painting too if anyone has access to the tool.

ESP Surface Preparation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1Thn0Dea94
 
The problem with powder coating is that it is thick, and difficult to apply evenly. It would probably stick to chrome, but there are other issues.

You may get a sufficiently thin coat in one area but another may be twice as thick, which fills in the engravings. Look at the serial number of the M3. These engravings are not as deep as the Leica script engravings.

I powder coated many cameras that had been stripped to brass, but often it required stripping it off again (with messy, smelly, toxic chemicals) and re-applying due to these problems.

When it worked it looked great and is very durable. I used a semi matte powder which masked finger prints and wasn't overly 'bling.'

Powder coating the levers and dials was tedious. It won't work on most, such as on Leica M shutter speed dials. Had to make fixtures so they were all connected together...

It also requires batch processing. You'd want to powder coat a lot of parts at the same time. Wouldn't make much sense to do one camera.

And even a little bit of excess in the wrong location meant that parts wouldn't fit together, which meant a lot of tedious labor removing the excess, often from hard-to-reach locations...

3611280783_92e1e18ec3_o.jpg


3609308079_56eb7308eb_o.jpg
 
Great information! Thank you for posting this. Did you do the powder coating yourself, or was it a refinishing shop? Also, was it an electrostatic process? BTW, the M3 looks great. I can see what you mean about the SN, but it still looks nice nonetheless.
 
I was a competitive pistol shooter for many years. Shooting enthusiasts use a variety of finishes on custom built guns that you might look at. Tolerances on guns are as tight if not more so than cameras.

A few years ago I considered doing an old M3 I had in ceramic camo finish but didn't. Here's a company I found that might do something interesting. https://www.cerakoteguncoatings.com/
I still think it would be interesting to take a camera and do a cool finish on it.
 
Ron Montad said:
Great information! Thank you for posting this. Did you do the powder coating yourself, or was it a refinishing shop? Also, was it an electrostatic process? BTW, the M3 looks great. I can see what you mean about the SN, but it still looks nice nonetheless.
Click to expand...

I did all the prep work and subbed out the coating.

Frankly speaking, success was all based on proper prep. The coating process is pretty simple, just have to have the equipment and use the right powder.

Yes, powder coating is electrostatic. That's why all the parts have to be connected so they are charged. 🙂

When I was doing these, I wasn't trying to recreate the 'black paint' enamel look, it was more a matter of refurbing the cameras and freshening up dings and nicks and the old chrome, providing a durable attractive finish. Customers generally didn't care about the serial number not being filled with white, although the depth varied from camera to camera, so some turned out perfectly.
 
I sanded down a Trip top and bottom, removed the paint from inside the engraving and took it into the local powder coating company. I said he'd do it free if I wasn't too bothered about the colour. So it was done in orange. It fitted back on the camera no problem, but he hadn't painted the inside. I think that's the trick, keep the paint off the inside.

I re-covered the camera in orange and brown patterned leather and sold it for a ton on ebay.

Powder coating does work on chrome just make sure that you:

Remove everything from inside the part to be painted.
Remove the paint inside the engraving using paint remover and a sharp toothpick.
Sand it down with 200 grit or finer
Wash with soapy water and dry with a glass towel or microfibre cloth
Rub it over with alcohol or acetone
Handle it with non powdered vinyl gloves
Instruct the 'painter' not to paint inside.

Then it will be fine
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom