Painting in winter can be a challenge, with the cold weather playing havoc with application and performance. Waterborne paints are typically based on tiny, thermoplastic particles that deform and stick to one another during the stresses of drying and film formation.
Particles deliberately engineered to be soft, form films easily even at quite low temperatures. The softness, however, extends to the finished film, making it prone to damage from dirt retention. Hard particles can be made, but they need heat, or large amounts of plasticising solvents, in order to form films.
A paint film dried in the cold can crack or just dry to a powder. This is because the acrylic base needs some warmth to make the particles soft enough to stick together. There’s an intermediate set of temperatures between 5°C to 10°C where the film appears normal, but looks can be deceptive, because it’s likely the coating will have much poorer durability than normal. The surface temperature of the substrate may be considerably colder than the ambient air temperature, which creates even more of a challenge for normal paints.
Resene’s technical team first developed a small range of winterised products that will dry in temperatures down to 3°C, which have been used in winter conditions for over 10 years.To make it even easier to choose a wintergrade finish, Resene now offers Resene Wintergrade Additive, which you can add to a range of selected waterborne Resene paints to winterise them. This will enable you to achieve a wintergrade finish in a wider range of products and colours.
The Resene Wintergrade range of products includes Resene Wintergrade Lumbersider waterborne low sheen, Resene Wintergrade Sonyx 101 waterborne semi-gloss, Resene Wintergrade Quick Dry waterborne primer undercoat and Resene Wintergrade Additive for adding to selected Resene waterborne paints, enabling them to be applied in colder conditions.
Resene also offers a made to order service, so if you need 200L or more of your chosen wintergrade finish, Resene can add the wintergrade additive and do the mixing for you.
Find out more at:
http://www.resene.co.nz/wintergrade
