Big Ted,big-ted wrote: ↑Thu Apr 02, 2020 3:13 am Thing is, they're covered in solder and flux, and the plastic coating that food-tin-cans get. I don't have much hope of cleaning all this off, so I wonder what my best hope is of getting paint to stick? ............. I don't really want to take the wheels off either since they're soldered on...
The skips look good, are they based on the design from the website run by Marc Horovitz (tinplate dad) and one of his daughters (tinplate girl)?
If you used normal tin cans as the material source, the inner lining will likely be an epoxy varnish and the outside printed label will be some sort of printing ink. A solvent based paint should work OK on those. I don't think water borne paints would work though.......
Enamel paint, or car duco, in a spraycan should stick to both, but I'd try the paint on a can first, as the solvents may attack the printing.
I don't always remove wheels for painting. Just spray them body colour and remove the paint off the wheel treads with a pipe cleaner dipped in paint thinner, while the paint is still soft.
Tom,
You've got chemical blackening on the brain.......
Tin cans are made from steel with a thin tin coating and a final varnish coating of some sort. No chance of chemically blackening that as it comes. Even if you manage to strip off the varnish, ordinary blackening solutions don't work on tin. Stripping off the tin to get down to the steel to blacken that isn't a trivial exercise either.
Regards,
Graeme