Technical Help

Q. We are a trading, not a manufacturing, company and need technical help. Recently we bought a shipment of white louvers for residential electric heaters from an off-shore supplier. Supposedly, a high-temperature-resistant paint, able to withstand 750°F, was applied. Unfortunately, the paint used on the louvers by the off-shore plant is not up to that standard, so the louvers turn from white to brown where the heat comes out in the electric heater unit. As you can imagine, this is unacceptable to our customer.

My question is: How do we correct the problem? How many choices do we have? What is the easiest and least costly way, relatively speaking? Thanks in advance for your answer. R.C.

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A. Obviously from the way you describe your company, you don’t have painting facilities. Therefore, you must go to a custom coater for any remedial finishing operation. Without knowing the specific “not up to that standard” paint used by your supplier, I can’t recommend a material that can be used to recoat. The best course of action is to strip and repaint the louvers.

The alternative is to paint over the existing paint using a quality high-temperature paint known to be able to withstand the operating temperature of the louvers. The problem with that course of action is the possibility of incompatibility with the existing paint. If it is not compatible, it may lift the existing paint on application or worse, fail in use by your customer’s customer. Then he will buy his louvers elsewhere.

Ask the custom coater about the compatibility problem. I’m sure he has addressed this problem before. If compatibility is a problem, stripping and repainting is your best course of action. It will be expensive but it may be the only solution.