Repainting Stoves

Ok, welcome to the show. Today on repairs101 we’re going to do something fun and easy. And who am I kidding? It’s fun because it’s easy. All right and it’s going to be very simple and easy, we just need some basic cleaning tools, a putty scraper. This is a Richards brand putty scraper that broke off and I just ground it down on my bench grinder, shorten it up so that is why it looks a little different from the one you see in the store but that is all. You know can get infinite life out of one of these things, just by grinding it down periodically. Ok, don’t kid yourself about tape – you get what you pay for. This is 3M brand scotch tape – it’s specifically for painting, it’s very expensive but you get your moneys worth. Paint will not creep under the edges, it will stay stuck for a good long time, through rain, anything. I have used it of course in the boat building industry. It is a remarkable product. And all you need then is a can of spray paint. I’m going with Tremclad, it is high heat, enamel, high gloss and it should make this old pooch look just gorgeous. Now of course the first thing you need to do is go down in the basement and find the breaker box and turn off the power to the stove cause the last thing I want to be doing is pulling it out here when it is live with 220 volts of power. Ok, so we’re down in the basement and we’re into the breaker box and we have a common problem here and I just wanted to point this out. I’ll bring it in for you, zoom that in a little bit and I will show you that look, it is written in pencil. If you want something to be permanent, generally speaking, a ball point pen. Anyways, so we come over here and we find the, it’s a double-forty amp breaker for the stove. Just shut that off. Ok, so this is just standard old stove. It has been in this household for many, many years. I am going to pull it all apart as best as I can and then we are going to do a bunch of taping and preparing for paint. So just pop these pieces of (parts) out, these trays. Take off these rings – we will give them a really good going over with the steel wool later and that will clean those up nice. These are just little nuts that sit on top of a threaded switch. I’ll get this one too, it’s a bit tricky. Here if you have never seen this before, I will just use the corner of my putty knife. Oops, there we go, this is a fuse panel for all the individual burners in the stove. There’s the legend. So if one of the burners is out say on your stove it may be just one of these fuses right here and they are just standard old-style glass fuses that you can replace easily. So… Ok, now I am just going to pop off these dials. They should lift of fairly easily. Ok that one came off nice and easy. There you go, just get in there like that. Just pull it off. Just get in behind them, there we go. Just get it a little higher. Right through there, we’re good, and there we go. Again, it just needs a little finessing. There we are. Just grab my Swiss army knife, edit out the part where I drop it, and just nick off these little corners that are not part of the general master plan. Again you know this is a stove right? It is not a hot rod so. Ok, so here’s another little fun idea. I gotta cover up these spots here so what I am going to do is get into a package of these otherwise useless, sorry but, adhesive bandages. The flat thing it will stick to. So I will just show you how to deal with this. We will just take a piece of tape, cut it down a little bit and make sure it is just the right size we need and put it over this bulgy light, try and stick it down. Let’s see if we can make it work any better than the bandaid. Seems to be trying to hold on so I am going to reach for my trusty Swiss army knife. Now of course you can just use an exacto. I am just used to reaching for this thing out of habit. It is always in my pocket and so I am used to working with it. But it is just to block the paint from getting on to the light so it is all we need. Ok, well as you can see we have got this bad boy all taped up and we are ready to haul her outside and give her a spray. So you are going to want to prep the surface. You want to rough it up with some 200 grit or coarser sand paper. Ok well as you can see, I’ve hauled it outside, pulled the door off and the lower drawer out. I supposed I should have shown you how I did that. Well that’s unfortunate, I am just going to have to make this side trip into the future and take the door off and show you how that’s done and how to take the drawer out. Ok welcome to the future, I am just going to show you really quickly how this is done. You open the stove door all the way and you simply yank on it and it snaps off like that. As you can see this particular stove has males on the door and female hinges that it locks into. To put it back in, it is very simple, simply line it back up and it drops in and you’re done. Here is a nice up close shot of that hinge. Ok so the drawer just comes out nice and easy. It is on rollers on a track. It is built onto the inside of the frame. So you just lift it up a little bit and out it comes. Nice and easy. That’s the rollers. And to put it back in, we just line up the rollers with the tracks. There it goes and there we go. Ok, I am ready to go outside and start spraying. I have got a can of spray. You want to make sure it is shaken really thoroughly. Here that ball swirling around there. You want to make it do its job ok so really swirl it around the outside and shake it back and forth vigorously. When you think you have shaken it enough, shake it twice as much. Spray lift, spray lift, spray lift. That way you don’t get any concentrations. The other thing you want to know is be prepared to do it in coats ok, in layers. Don’t try to cover it all up in one shot ok. You are just kidding yourself and you’re going to have runs and you’re going to have uneven coverage. It is just not going to look good. Now it is easy if some of the original colour still shows through that’s normal. You want to do another coat then it is going to stop showing through or maybe on the third coat or the fourth coat, who knows? Depending on if you are going to put white over cherry red, it’s going to take a long time to cover that up. Ok so I just take this strap and put it up over my head and I am ready to work. Let’s go. Yeah it’s a tough call, depends on how much time you have got. I would say seven coats is probably pretty safe. What you really want is to have a good thick coat on the top otherwise you are going to get heat-checking around the burner elements. Ok here we are three hours later. I‘ve got it back inside. It has been base coated. I have to call it a base coat because unfortunately the wind picked up while I was outside and it deposited all kinds of dust and little bits of debris on the surface so I am going to sand that off. I going to build the world’s smallest paint booth right here in the kitchen and I am going to spray it. I have cleaned it up, stripped the parts off of it, scraped it, cleaned it some more, taped it up, hauled it outside, gave it a base coat. Jumped in the car, went to the corner hardware store, got an extra can of paint. Ok so I am trying to dry sand the dust and the flaws out of it with 220 paper and its coming up pretty nice. Got to put the lid right back on that. It is highly volatile and therefore very quick evaporating. Let’s have a look. Let’s just pick these little guys off. Booyah. Well I wish I could tell you that I created this terrible edge here as you can see where it bled on purpose. But it is not the fault of the tape. This is my own poor workmanship. I was in a hurry and I think you will recall my saying something about this not being a hot rod, just being an old stove so who cares? But I am going to take advantage of this moment to show you how easily it is to repair a problem like that with just a little acetone and a clean rag. All right there we are. What do you think? Its 5 hours later and tada. All finished and assembled. I won’t say ready to cook on because as with everything I like to give it 24 hours to cure. Have a look at some of my other videos. In particular, stoves 101 might be interesting to you. It is full of all kinds of other information that I haven’t covered in this video as well as Spray painting 101. All kinds of tips and tricks as to how to get a really good finish out of an ordinary can of spray paint.