painting polyurethane foam

[aferguson]

i have a large chunk of polyurethane foam, the kind used for padding in car seats, used for foam mattresses etc.

I want to paint it up as a piece of scenery. The thing is, it's fairly big and would need to be rolled up and stored away. My question is will the paint hold up if the foam is being rolled, compressed etc or will it flake off or will the foam crack?

Anyone have experience with this?

[pickelhaube]

i have a large chunk of polyurethane foam, the kind used for padding in car seats, used for foam mattresses etc.

I want to paint it up as a piece of scenery. The thing is, it's fairly big and would need to be rolled up and stored away. My question is will the paint hold up if the foam is being rolled, compressed etc or will it flake off or will the foam crack?

Anyone have experience with this?

The only hope you have is acrylic paint. If it goes in like a sponge and the foam has its texture you should be all right.

If the foam is totally covered it my bend but cracking could happen. Then you will get the flakes.

The best thing is to try dyes rather than paint.

My 2 cents.

[kduck]

If you use dye then make sure it works on synthetics materials. I did a quick search and found a 2 part video on YouTube that might come in helpful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUENb-vD ... re=related

OTOH you said you wanted to paint it up as scenery so that may be totally useless. Perhaps you could try some type of colored ink that can be brushed on. A craft shop might be able to help.

[Jesse James]

Fabric paints are often acryls with some flex to them.

If you've got enough of this stuff you can try some practice work on some spare chunks, what I'd do then is get fabric paint and some cheap paints like Apple Barrel at the dollar store, thin/mix with water, and see if the foam takes them better. Let them dry and then give it a test to see if it chips or whatnot.

Id' think if it's like those egg carton mattress pad doo-dads, it'll soak it up, and won't really damage much, but rather be sort of dyed by the sollution.

[aferguson]

thanks for the tips guys. I found this and think i'll try it. I should be able to pick some up locally at an automotive store.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/VINYL-FA ... ccessories

I'm thinking of making a section of aicraft carrier deck out of an old polyurethane foam mattress i have....it's about 6 feet by 4 1/2 feet. I'm not planning on setting aircraft on it but rather posing different planes landing or taking off from it. I can lay it on top of my bed for play time (heh) but would need to roll it up and put it back in storage otherwise.

Since this paint is for car seats it should be able to take the handling, i think.