Experience on painting plates?

[naokira]

So how long they will last? I don't know yet if its going to be stainless steel or anodized aluminum.
I wanna go crazy and paint it two tone-ish.
like hesterDW did:


Also, anyone there has painter their switch top? Too poor for abostudio right now.

[naokira]

Bump

[Tarzan]

Plates are easy to paint; the hard part is desoldering all the bloody switches so you can get them out to paint.

I'm painting two plates at the moment, one will be off-white or cream (similar to case color), the other an olive drab/military camo color.  So far I've cleaned and sanded the plates, and primed each with metal-etching primer.





I used about four coats of paint per side, letting each coat dry to touch before recoating (5-10 minutes).  Then I wet-sanded the plates with 2000 grit sandpaper, as there were some paint spatters.  Painted them with another couple of coats of primer, now I'm letting the first color coats dry.

Look up Photoelectric's painting thread, super informative and excellent step by step instructions.

[naokira]

Wow man! Thanks for this! Do you know how long the paint will last?

[Hellmark]

If you've properly painted the plates (IE, surface prep to clean oils, sprayed primer, etc) then things should last you longer than anything else on the keyboard. The plates see very little touching or movement, as most plates are fairly well obscured by the keycaps, and often a top layer, so you don't have things rubbing the paint off.

Even if you just do a simple cleaning and spraying with rattlecan style spraypaint then you should have something that lasts a long time. Really all depends on the level of work that you want to put into it, and what materials you use.