Two chips out of tub. Looks like ?? disgruntled home owner? Or, maybe a workman dropped a tool.
Anyway need to find out the easieist, best porcelain repair kit to use on this white tub.
I would like to post pictures, before and after, but haven't been able to park the pictures in a public spot. Can I send a couple of pictures to someone to post? I tried to gain access to public pic posting when I posted a question about an exterior painting problem, but at every public website tried, can't even pick up a picture! let alone try to register there.
Or, is there some photo parking spot that might work? Will this gmail account let me park them for public access?
*Kit Industries in New Jersey makes a product called Porc-a-Fix with several colors to choose from. I could not find their web site. Home Depot sells one or two of their colors.
If you don't get any hits, post again and I'll look up the info for the Canadian Distributor, and they would know the contact information for the factory, who in turn would know who their US distributor is.
Porc-a-fix Paint is a hard drying oil based paint that comes pretinted to match all the colours that both Crane and American Standard used in all of their bath tubs since the 1950's when coloured bathroom fixtures became popular.
The tiny bottle of Porc-a-fix you buy comes with a small sheet of instructions and two small pieces of sandpaper. Both should be thrown in the garbage where they belong.
Mix up the Porc-a-fix to a uniform colour by stirring it. Dip a toothpick into the Porc-a-fix and then touch the end of the toothpick to the chip and move the toothpick around so that the paint drains off the toothpick onto the chip.
Cover the whole chip that way.
Once the paint is dry to the touch (within a few hours) use a single edge razor blade to shave the excess paint off the chip. Be careful to hold the razor so that if follows the contour of the tub. If your chip is on a corner where you can't do that, then just leave the excess paint on to dry.
Porc-a-fix used to be made by KIT Industries, but they've since been sold to a different US company that is continuing production of these paints. Porc-a-fix also comes in a number of colours that major appliance manufacturers like GE and Frigidaire used for their stove cook tops.
I own a small apartment block, and I've been using Porc-a-fix to repair chips in bathtubs for over 25 years now. I don't know if it's the best porcelain chip repair available. So far as I know, it's the ONLY porcelain chip repair system available for coloured tubs. If your tub is white, you could probably use any white Testor's plastic model paint to do the repair providing you get a reasonable colour match on the white.
If the chip is on the bottom of the tub, and deep enough so that the steel is exposed and rusting, it's best to coat the chip with epoxy before painting it to match the surrounding colour. If that's the case, post again and I'll explain a good way to apply epoxy to the chip.
Is it really porcelain? That's not very common these days. Most tubs made in the last 20 years or more are fiberglass with gelcoat on them. You can still get real porcelain but you pay a lot for it.
He's talking about a steel tub with a porcelain enamel finish on it.
"Porcelain enamel" is a special kind of powder coating. It's not the same kind of porcelain that toilet bowls, toilet tanks and bathroom sinks are made of. It's a powdered plastic (usually polyester) that gets electrostatically sprayed onto the steel and then baked so that the polyester plastic resins melt and fuse together to form a smooth and very hard coating over the steel.
It depends entirely on the Tg (glass transition temperature) of the polyester.
(aside: plastics don't have fixed melting temperatures like pure solid materials (like ice or copper). Instead, they have a temperature range over which they go from a soft and flexible material to a hard and brittle material. The middle of that temperature range is called the "glass transition temperature" or "Tg".)
Just because something is hard, doesn't mean it's not made of plastic. It's just a different kind of plastic than you're used to.
I am not at all familiar with the process described in the web page Vic Smith linked to whereby an enamel frit is dusted onto an iron or steel tub that's well above the frit's melting temperature. I would be concerned that heating the steel would result in it rusting rapidly, even before the molten frit has had a chance to coat the tub and prevent the oxygen in the air to come into contact with the hot iron or steel.
In the process called "powder coating" that I am familiar with, a mixture of plastic resins (commonly polyester plastic) and coloured solid particles (called "pigments") are electrostatically sprayed onto a metal object. (most commonly the object being powder coated is metal, anyway)
That powder coated metal object is then baked in a large oven at typically about 350 degrees F for a half hour or so.
The heat both melts the plastic resins and causes them to chemically crosslink very densely with each other. As the plastic resins melt, they flow together to form a smooth plastic film over the metal object with the coloured pigments suspended inside that film very much like raisins inside raisin bread.
When that "powder coating" cools, it's very much more durable than field applied coatings like polyurethane or epoxy floor paints.
'The Powder Coating Institute'
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'What is Powder Coating | The Powder Coating Institute'
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Some common examples of things that are powder coated instead of painted are the steel deck of a gas or electric lawn mower or the steel scoop of a snow blower, a steel bicycle frame and steel or aluminum patio furniture.
Porcelain enamel is a kind of powder coating that differs from powder coating only in that the baking occurs at a higher temperature. Generally, if the baking temperature is below about 700 degrees F, the coating is called a "powder coating", but if the baking occurs above 700 degrees F, the resulting coating is called "porcelain enamel". Generally, the higher the baking temperature, the harder and more durable the resulting coating will be.
Even though the process used in porcelain enamel coatings is identical to that of powder coating, the porcelain enamelers have their own web site:
'Porcelain Enamel Institute'
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'Plumbing and Sanitaryware - Porcelain Enamel Institute'
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The "glass lining" on the inside of your water heater is a porcelain enamel. The cooktop of a gas or electric stove will be powder coated because paints couldn't stand up to those temperatures without softening and discolouring. The clothes tumbler drum and top of a clothes dryer will typically be powder coated if they're made of steel.
And, since porcelain enamels become harder and more durable with baking temperature, the hardest and most durable porcelain enamel inside your house is probably the blueish grey coating on the interior of your stove's steel oven. That coating was baked on at about 1300 degrees F, which is why self clean cycles of 900 deg. F won't harm it.
Thank you, excellent suggestion to throw away that sandpaper.
Luckily no rusting, since chip(s) is on the front lip of the tub. About 1 inch by 3/4 inch like someone dropped their pipe wrench, or a heavy 4 ft metal pipe had been standing outside the tub and was allowed to fall onto the edge. Thus, front lip and about the right angle of hit.
There are two chips, but the other one is smaller, 1/4 inch by 1/4 inch or so. Like who ever dented did it twice.
This tub is white so should be easy to match. With that size and ease of color match [white, but please no yellowing with time] is that paint kit still the best?
If you're suggesting patience to fill and shave, fill and shave, etc No problem. You're talking to a guy that took 3 hours to fix an $8 hair dryer! And, and to rework a badly weathered 9 ft by 18 ft tongue and groove porch floor, manually sanded [we're talking about a floor painted with some kind of antique-like armour! I don't know what they used years ago, but that old gray porch paint is either rubbery or harder than sandpaper] to refinish and paint to match exterior color then seal with multiple clear floor 'paint', [didn't like the paint effect] manually sanded again to strip my own paint, then used a hand grout saw [wore out three of them] to get all the weathered wood and dirt out of the cracks [with dry rot, some cracks opened to over 1/4 inch. these were narrow floor boards too I calculated two city blocks of linear length] then filled the cracks with Minwax two part wood epoxy fill and oil finished the floor for a beautiful natural wood look. Only to find that the MinWax epoxy product was doing physically what I wanted - perfectly adhering the flooring into a solid slab BUT had a noticeable green tinge making the floor look obnoxiously striped. So,...manually sanded all off again, and PAINTED the epoxy in the cracks with my wife's tiny artist brushes to match each adjacent wood grain, blending in the range of colors and the grain for each board beside each crack. Then put on three coats of heavy oil base, again hand sanding to flatten between each coat. Result after about 3 months? A beautiful, natural looking redwood porch floor and preserved the 100 year old flooring to meet my goal of keeping the home as close to the original as possible.
Regarding "This tub is white so should be easy to match" I'm not trying to dash your hopes but "white" is probably the most difficult color to match that there is because there are so *many* variations of it.
If the kit that you buy is for a color of a specific manufacturer, you should have no/few problems. If it is not - judging by what you detailed in your last paragraph - you should also meet success by proceeding in a similar manner with the tub. One hint: it is often easier to get a good color match by stippling various colors with a tiny brush than by painting the entire surface.
True, the spectrum involved makes for interesting matches. My main concern is that the patch will yellow with time. That will show. Anything is better than that black showing through. Amazingly, when we asked our realtor for details photos of the chipped damage, she was surprised since she hadn't noticed the chips until we mentioned, and she had been showing the home for over 18 months!
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