I was at the hardware store today buying Zinsser BIN undercoat and I saw one of their other products "Peel Stop", which is supposed to "Glue down edges of old coatings, Seal and bridge cracking and checking, and Bind chalky surfaces".

Anyone used this and is it any good?

I have some painted galv steel windows which has some flaking/peeling and cracking. Now I am not expecting this product to perform miracles, but it seems to me that no matter how hard you sand off the old paint, unless you remove every last skerrick of old paint, that there will be some flaky bit somewhere that is lifted by top coating with oil-based enamel top coat.

So after I have removed all the flaky paint I can without sanding until next year, is this "Peel Stop" worth using after that?

The blurb says "Even after painted surfaces have been scraped and sanded, tiny cracks and gaps remain under the edges of old paint. PEEL STOP seeps into these spaces and ‘glues’ them down, forming a tight bond that helps stop future peeling"

That's all I am after - gluing down the little flaky bits you didn't see to stop them from being lifted by the top coat. I'd probably only spot prime with this stuff, on the daggy bits.

Does it work?

Secondly, it says suitable topcoats are latex or alkyd paint. It seems that latex is just American for acrylic paint (and latex is a misnomer actually), but it's not so clear (to me) that alkyd is American for oil-based enamel.

The top coat I would use is White Knight Rust Guard Epoxy Enamel (which is just the White Knight equivalent of Wattyl Kill Rust Epoxy Enamel, but Killrust doesn't come in flat white).

Is "alkyd" just a generic US term for what we would called oil-based enamel? Is White Knight Rust Guard Epoxy Enamel an "alkyd" paint?

BTW I was buying Zinsser BIN to undercoat some old interior semigloss enamel trim. I mistakenly tried to use ESP on the old interior semigloss enamel trim (I read the blurb and it said it would make paint stick to such things), but when I had completed ESP plus undercoat plus 2 acrylic gloss top coats, it didn't stick. So I had to scrape it off, sand it and redo the whole &&^*&^* lot. Just as well it was a small room. Then read the ESP fine print and it said that you should apply the ESP with steel wool and do a test patch to see if the paint sticks properly. That's more work than sanding it to degloss it. Anyway I am now taking no chances and using Zinsser BIN after sanding heavily. And also I am suspicious of "blurbs" in general.

2nd thing I noticed was that the various Zinsser undercoats are slightly cheaper than Dulux undercoat !!!


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