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    March 28, 2014

    Steel Buyers Basics: High-End and Custom Pre-Painted Steel

    Written by Mario Briccetti

    The best pre-painted steel coating system (for color retention) is made of Polyvinyl Difluoride (PVDF) and is sold under the trade names of Kynar 500 and Hylar 5000 (people typically call this paint Kynar). A buyer should know that this type of paint system comes with several high-end options that I am going to touch on in this article.

    The standard type of PVDF pre-paint steel coating has a total top layer of thickness of approximately 1 mil thick (a mil is 1/1000 of an inch). 75% of this layer is the finish coat and 25% of the layer is the bottom primer. PVDF comes in a wide variety of colors ranging from whites to bright reds to metallic that change color based on the angle you look at them. Typically, whites are less expensive than darker colors, bright colors even more expensive and metallic colors the most expensive.

    Mario Briccetti

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