Blackouts for the chrome around the windscreen.

[Big Rob]

Yeah, the trims are definitely stainless, but a fairly low grade. I have some that have quite a fair amount of rust spots in certain places.

Stainless id funny stuff, I re-built my balcony handrails at home and updated the wooden rails with stainless cable for a more modern look. In some cables it appears that one strand is rusting while the rest are perfect. I also have a cheap laundry tub that is (supposed to be) stainless and it has serious rust and needs replacing soon.

[Jerry]

Yeah, the trims are definitely stainless, but a fairly low grade. I have some that have quite a fair amount of rust spots in certain places.

Stainless id funny stuff, I re-built my balcony handrails at home and updated the wooden rails with stainless cable for a more modern look. In some cables it appears that one strand is rusting while the rest are perfect. I also have a cheap laundry tub that is (supposed to be) stainless and it has serious rust and needs replacing soon.

I did all the stainless balcony rails at my place too, all from 316 grade and went for the mill/satin finish...with in 2 months they had tea staining starting. I was told the finish needs to be fully polished/mirror finish to prevent this, so I removed the rails and had them electro polished, this defiantly helped and also washing it down with water prevent the staining too. I still wounded if the marine grade stainless is as good a quality as it use to be years ago, like everything now made in China.

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Quality grades of stainless steel dont rust, not easily anyway, but are more expensive to produce. So lower grades are used these days for many domestic products. Interested to know, whats the brand on that laundry tub Rob? Australian made or not?

Also, if you go with acrylic satin as Byron suggests (thats what I'll be doing) I dont see why you need to scuff the trim up first, the paint should easily stick to the stainless trim and you'll probably get a better finish leaving it flat, (maybe go as far as a green nylon scourer) but clean it well of course and use prepsol for the clean just before the paint. Also, using acrylic is way cheaper, and as Byron points out, easily repairable. Intrerestingly, a little while back, I found 3M made a black paint in both gloss or satin, the satin seems made for this sort of job, I saw it being sold at a discontinued run out price in a local paint supplier last year. I got it to use for the top of the dashboard, 10 bucks a large aerosol can, seemed really sticky stuff, i reckon its good paint, slightly annoying nozle on the can though, (tendancy to drip on to the job just as you finish) I dunno if its still available, but the top of my dash looks like the original paint - if you can still get it, its good stuff, maybe they got a new nozzle design.

Acrylic satin sound like the go Dave, I like the idea of being able to touch it up....might just test it out on some scrap stainless first and see if I'm happy with how it turns out. I will check out the paint suppliers and see if they have any of those cans. Cheers Jerry.