Finishing Polystyrene

[Henry Barker]

Hi there we make quite big stuff in polystyrene for trade shows and TV, you can use a water based acrylic, but most that you buy here are low on pigment, meaning several coats of paint, so we use 1 Shot instead, and a small can goes a long way.

Exterior use, I haven’t used it for exterior signs as I use HDU polyurethane for letters outside, and for that we sand use an auto primer filler, and then Standox basecoat, to get a really deep goodlooking finish, wouldn’t work on polystyrene though unless you covered it with an epoxy (expensive) or I’ve heard about using a waterbased floor glue and then paint.

Was having a great chat yesterday with a guy from Italy who builds beautiful huge (several metres) figures, pirates,nudes etc etc for clubs bars and restaurants, in both HDU and polystyrene, besides being a great pinstriper, muralist, and custom painter, he just happened to be visiting a guy here who restores Corvettes for a living….nice surprise.

[Rab]

Thanks Henry,

I’ll try the Acrylic paint or see if I can find some 1 Shot.
are there any glues suitable for polystyrene ?

I found this page on HDU after a bit of searching;
http://www.signweb.com/dimensional/cont/hduexposedb.htm

could anyone recommend a UK supplier of HDU ?

Thanks,

Rab

[Henry Barker]

Suppliers of HDU in the UK:

You have Hartbrights in Manchester, they are signmakers who run 2 Gerber 408 routers, do alot of pubsigns, Terry Colley who run a UK Letterheads meet works there or did. They have a container full of Precision Board by Coastal Enterprises, its a good board costs about £300-350 per 8×4.

Then you have Corian Distributors, who are UK agents for Sign-Foam.

Paint you can get from AS handover in London, for gluing HDU we use 3M Scotch-Weld DP 190 contruction adhesive which is a 2 component glue used in their pistol system. You can also use other polyurethane glues. For polystyrene we have something here made by Casco called Superset which is amazing and the best I have used and I have tried lots, not sure if you have Casco in the UK

[Robert Lambie]

quote :

Precision Board by Coastal Enterprises, its a good board costs about £300-350 per 8×4.

what thickness is that henry?

[Henry Barker]

2″ I haven’t bought from them for awhile as we source some material here as the pound is expensive.

[Rab]

Thanks for the info Henry,

there seems to be a huge leap in cost between the builder’ polystyrene and the HDU, is there any alternatives inbetween or are most customers happy to pay for HDU ?

Rab