Painting Plastic

[HelloIDistance]

I am painting my case and the front part of the case is made out of plastic, so I have a few questions. Would you still sand inbetween coats or sand at all with plastic? I think you use a primer specially made for plastic too, correct?

Thanks

[Cell]

you can buy a plastic dye, its a special dye so that it soaks into the plastic. It will work much better.

[Legion©]

Vinyl Dye is indeed the easiest way to color the plastic.

However if you want to match the color to the rest of the case you can use Plastic Primer. If you do go that route, clean the plastic thoroughly, prime with the plastic primer, don't sand!, then apply standard primer, and carry on as normal. When sanding the ordinary primer, be careful not to go through or you may mess up the Plastic Primer and thus the adhesion to the plastic.

[boostdemon]

Heres my experience:

Had to paint a door pocket in my girlfriends car, had to match the stock color but couldnt find the right one at the junkyard. So i went to home depot and found these two jewels:

Rust-oleum Plastic primer:
http://images.acmehardware.com/200x200/6082259.jpg
Rust-oleum Satin black "outdoor" enamel:
http://ts.smoothcorp.com/cornerhardware/202869.299x299.jpeg

All i did was wash off the plastic with dish soap, let it dry... then wiped it with alcohol to remove any left over oils from hands and whatnot. (skipped the alcohol on a few other projects and it didnt make a difference).
Spray the thing with 1 light coat of plastic primer - just enough to get the thing sticky and cover it up, let it dry for 24 hours... then sprayed it with the black satin outdoor paint.

It still looks as good as when i did it (almost a year ago), the paint doesnt chip when scraped or kicked, didnt bubble in 100ºF+ temps over the summer.

[superkdogg]

There's also a Krylon for plastic. I've found that it needs at least two coats and I needed to clean my case front as well as roughen it with a very fine sandpaper to get a good finish, but it worked in the end.

[ryuji]

so regular primer is no good for plastic? even if its sanded to bare plastic and roughed up