painting MDF

hammerite stonechip paint works suprisingly well on mdf

no i think it refers to being resistant to stone related chipping of paint. goes on pretty much like satin black

Black vinyl cut from the seat backs of something at the breakers, can of spray glue from B&Q (other DIY/carpet stores are available) couple of hours stretching and gluing, no long hours of prep and sanding, no worries about chipping it, and it won't look like MDF

have just used normal rattle cans in the past on wood

dare say filler primer would be enough to fill it and give a flat surface after a sand

the ends will be very porous. Either use watered down PVA to seal these or you can use body filler to skim it all up or you can use spray filler/spray putty or you can use a mixture of the above.

You CAN get a "car body" quality paint finish using MDF. This is something we used to do at college for making design prototypes. It's some years since I did this (OK, it's 15 years!) but I still remember the basics.


1/ Make your own filler by mixing MDF dust from sanding with PVA glue

2/ Sand off the original outer finish on the MDF to make the untreated finish more porous

3/ Apply an acid catalysed laquer to the sanded surface (plenty of info on google) - you apply this with a brush, then sand back with wet & dry then repeat, using increasingly fine grades of wet & dry - the coats are built up until the finish is hard and smooth, no longer porous.

4/ Spray with primer, wet & dry back

5/ Continue to finish as if spraying a car body repair


We used to spray with cellulose based car paint aerosols in a chamber that effectively "sucked" the spray paint onto the object, this helped to prevent the paint drying mid-air and causing a matt finish. I expect you could rig something similar with an old hoover, or just rotary polish the surface to a shine.

Acid catalysed laquer is what we used to use when spraying top coats with a cellolose based paint. If you intend to finish with acrylic based spray, it might be better to use an acrylic based laquer?


From memory, we used to do about 3-4 laquer coats, 2-3 primer coats and howver many top coats we could be arsed with!

Done properly, the finish will eventually look like highly polished painted metal, it is pretty time consuming, but worth the effort.