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Concrete Colouring
Alan


Joined: 06 May 2005
Posts: 1
City and State: Adelaide,Australia
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G'Day everyone
Could anyone tell me how to get a bronze or iron finnish on concrete without using paint.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks Alan
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Jeffrey
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The term 'cold bronzing' has been used for several different processes. So first you have to find out which one is being referred to.
Bronzing, therefore, has been anything from painting with a bronze colored paint,
to painting with a fine bronze powder paint,
to leafing with sheets of bronze leaf (also called bronze gold leaf but really bronze... gold leaf is really gold),
to electroplating with real bronze (usually a copper)
to spraying with molten bronze (also called metalizing) at a temperature high enough to melt either the sintered (powdered) metal or the wire fed metal before it goes through the tip of the torch.
This metalizing is really a surface coat and as a result on anything real small it tends to give a slightly sand cast /grain surface so begins to destroy any fine detail. It is one I have used from time to time since 1969 and was originally developed (I believe in England) and that equipment is expensive but found under the company name of METCO.
I use it on large objects only (they even surface bridges with zinc wire fed through the gun) and it can spray nearly any metal
you can get in the right wire form (sometimes flux centered).
Metalizing like this also needs some 'tooth' to the surface to start to stick to when first beginning to spray it as it has a tendency to peel off until the whole surface has had a semi bonding coat. I doubt that this would be your best solution for a 14 inch statue.
As for 'casting' it in the cold cast process, that would probably be by using a plastic based binder mix with a fine powdered bronze. Very expensive unless you can get a source of bronze powder from some factory reject system.
Commercially it goes for from $7 to $22 per pound and makes the process more expensive that just the normal hot bronze casting with real ingot.
It also gives a result that I have yet to find looks anything better than plastic. If you can resurface the piece to expose the real metal particles you have a chance of now doing a chemical patina and it can look like old bronze but forget the thought of being able to buff and bring out the real bronze look.

Cool
Concrete Colouring
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