Meddings pillar drill colour

Quick question

Renovating a Medding pillar drill. It looks like its painted Harmerrite Green (Hammered finish)

Should I stick with this colour or paint it any colour I want

Does it really matter? Your personal choice. Others might have different ideas.

Your choice of colour is up to you, however take care re-coating Hammerite and similar paints as they can affect the finish on the new coat of paint. This will be especially so if the present finish is flatted down - even worse than painting over the top of the old paint.

Try a test first and leave it to dry thoroughly to see if you are going to have any issues. If you do then total removal is probably the only answer, if you wish to achieve a good finish.

Thanks.

So best just the degrease and paint and not flatten off?

No it does not matter but I always thing about if/when I come to sell it and wonder if its the correct colour will affect resale value

Edited By petro1head on 04/12/2019 11:02:34

If you do intend to sell, provided you've done a great job and it looks lovely, it should not put folks off. Unless it was a hideous shade of course.

I recently restored my Fobco Star and sprayed it Aubergine(my favourite colour) as opposed to the usual cream. I think it looks the business so go with what you want

Well Hammerite no longer do the mid green, just a dark green

Hmm decissions desissions.

Spray or brush on?

Edited By petro1head on 04/12/2019 17:48:54

The Dark Green is hideous imo. Meddings offer a refurbishment service, they use a light blue colour. Looks great.

The colour of a machine makes no difference to its performance. The last place I worked in painted everything, machines and benches and everything else a bright yellow ! Maybe it reminded them of Spring or else they got the paint cheap. Made no difference ,everything worked the same, so go for your colour of choice.

I have gone for smooth Hamerite blue

Colour

I actually thought Meddings used blue anyway, they must have changed colours in the past?

I wonder why so many machine tools were painted either Grey or Green? The last Harrison M300 they bought where I used to work was white, if not at least a very, very pale Grey.

They are blue now but back in the 90s there were Hammered Mid Green

My pet hate with repainting is that people paint over useful things like motor rating plates and fasteners that crack all the paint off when dismantling is required. I like the blue.my MF4 is blue but the M10 is grey but will be blue one day

Mike

Agreed, I will attemt to remove as much as possible

My Meddings bench-drill is a mid-blue, in I think without traipsing down the garden to have a look, a light hammer finish.

It keeps company, a Drummond hand-shaper painted white many years ago: I don't know the original colour for that but suspect deep maroon.

A while ago I repaired a small 'Record' drill-vice that had lost all its paint thanks to having been used in a grit-blasting cabinet! Once I'd screwed on a flanged bush to replace the cast-on but snapped-off, T-headed spigot under the moving jaw, I finished it with spray primer and guessed-at "Record Blue", both from Halfords. The blue was probably labelled something like "Rolls-Royce Azure Seas", but the mended vice looks right, works well and has paid for the aerosols umpteen times over.

(You think that past use bad? The grit-blasting had not really harmed the important parts of the vice. On a geology-club visit to a masonry-stone quarry, I was not the only one to spot the sad site of a Bridgeport turret-mill and big Dean, Smith & Grace lathe, both obviously used for machining architectural parts from the quarried sandstone! There are machine-tools made for such work, but perhaps those unfortunate specimens had come at the right price and if not adopted by the stone works might have been scrapped...)

Got the VFD today

That's the colour! Much nicer than the hammerite dark green. Funnily enough I have one of these drills waiting for restoration so I'm watching with interest.

Some before and after pics would be good!

After the war there was a huge surpluss of green paint, that explains why a lot of equipment from around the 50's was green!

And I'm sure Myfords were painted with leftover admiralty grey for the next 50 years or so.

looks to me as though your drill will be on trend colour wise.

Pantone 2020

Edited By V8Eng on 06/12/2019 09:37:45