Corten Steel Best Way to Preserve Orange Rust Color

Eva Miller "A taste Rust"

A Picasso sculpture made of Corten, in two stages of oxidation.
The building behind the sculpture is clad in the same material

If you've ever seen a dark-brown skyscraper, it was probably made from a special steel called Corrosive Tensile Steel. Corten steel (sometimes spelled, with all the guile of an early programming language, COR-TEN) is deliberately designed to oxidize; the resulting rust forms a protective, weather-proof coating on the steel, so from an engineering perspective, the building never needs to be painted (or eaten).

Corten is used in a very famous Picasso sculpture, as well as in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the U.S. Steel building in Pittsburgh, and the Daley Center Building in Chicago. Buildings clad in Corten start out a neutral gray color, then turn bright orange after a couple of rains (usually discoloring nearby gutters and sidewalks in the process), and after a year or so, settle into a dark brown

I like to think of Rust, the programming language, as a similarly earth-toned protective layer, but over a piece of software instead of a piece of steel. The Rust language won't win any beauty contests, but it is impervious to the various elements that may ravage a multi-threaded software program. Initially you might complain about Rust's requirements and appearance, but in time it will feel normal, and eventually you'll start having smug thoughts about the reduced costs of long-term maintenance. So there you have it - Rust, the Corten steel of modern programming languages

WP

Stopping the oxidation would require coating the surface with some type of sealer to keep the atmosphere from contacting the metal surface.

This steel darkens even in very dry climates.

I suggest you talk to your steel supplier or a paint shop to see if they know of anything.

Clear coating might work, might not.

You need to remove the rust and use an acid etch primer and paint to your specification....treat it as any other carbon steel....

Match the color to a sample on the palette and save for paint color selection....

Thanks all for your suggestions, I want to get a certain patina, and stop the process at that point. When it gets to the final purple brown color, it will be too dark and monotone. Have seen samples of painted steel simulating the effects of rust from roofing suppliers but the pattern is too regular and looks more like paint than rust. A thread at one point mentioned using wax? Also a few different poly based sealers???

Take a look at these:

Owatrol : OWATROL OIL

Penetrol Anti-Rust Control - The Flood Company Australia

I'm not sure how to test the effectiveness of these, over time.

The sealers won't work, and wax products would be used in a corrosive environment to keep the panel from rusting away but need yearly maintenance,,any I've seen result in a dark finish, no coating will work without first removing the rust on the surface....You could use a textured paint....or texture application technique, of which there are many...

Hi Solar Eagle Thanks for great information Making me rethink paint. Still like the incredible patina of dripping rust, but if you seal it to no effect, then why try? Not sure if my painting techniques are developed enough to mimic this rusting patina, but willing to try. Any further suggestions much appreciated.

This probably takes some practice, but a piece of sheet metal should be easy enough to get hold of....found this...

http://www.ehow.com/how_6547190_paint-rust-effects.html

Corten is a specific steel manufacturer--US Steel??? Probably copyrighted. I prefer the generic term "weathering steel."

Corten is sort of like Kleenex or Xerox.

US Steel owns the trademark, but it's now manufactured by Arcelor-Mittal.

I have weathering steel on my house. When installing it I had concerns that it maybe too reqular in the rusting. This has not proven to a problem and there are slight variations in the patena.

For some interior light fittings that I built I exaggerated the patena variations by throwing salt on the surface, dampening the surface with water and leaving it over night before cleaning. This affect hasn't changed after 18 months.

The patena on the outside steel changes with light and weather conditions. Sometimes it looks really orange, but whilst raining it goes dark brown. I've got bright corten sheets still sitting in the shed. (For the next project: that commences as soon as I finish doing the fabrication drawings tonight.)

The process of forming the patena took only a few days. But I guess it depends on where you live and if you use a hose to kick start the process.

If you can obtain small samples of corten why not try spraying with a few different lacquers and just see whether the result looks good to you? if you don't like the final effect or the lacquers darken the rusted metal then it may suggest certain avenues are looking doubtful on the basis of your own aesthetics?

Surely part of the appeal of the corten look is that it looks powdery or dusty, would that subtle texture change in an undesired way when coated?

Trying to halt chemistry in mid-flow and yet at the same time not to interfere with optical properties of the raw patina seems to be a challenging path and difficult to be sure of success since you have to wait a long time to be sure that you have really cracked it?

Thanks all for sharing. My installation area is under a covered patio. I live two miles from the ocean. So unless I oxidize the corten prior to instillation, it might take quite a while to rust.

We built a custom vertical copper paneled fireplace , plaster with fire blasted copper sprayed over. The surface was then sprayed with an acid to get the proper patina. The acid was then neutralized, allowed to dry, then I believe several coats of a clear acrylic, or lacquer to "lock it in". I have forgotten the coating, so sorry I can't be of more help, but it still looks that way 12 years later.

Years back my wife made what she called rust art. When the metal rusted to the point she liked it, she would coat with a product called POR 15. Many products were tried before and did not work. Most products allow the surface to breath, POR 15 did not. It might work for you.

I'm somewhat late to the party here, but I'd like to present a different perspective.

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Instead of painting to attempt to recreate the genuine surface and having to scrape and repaint regularly....why not enjoy the genuine surface, and then remove the protective layer chemically or mechanically when you want to refresh the color?

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This would require about the same amount of periodic work as painting, perhaps less. However the choice to refresh the patina would not be as obligatory as repainting. Peeling faded paint is not the same as corten that has weathered as expected. If you don't repaint, it looks like crap. It you don't refresh the patina, it looks like corten.

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There shouldn't be much material lost. Probably similar to the amount lost to repainting, since painting will require getting down to bare metal as well.

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Lastly, you don't run the risk of psychologically scarring the material by insisting that it must be painted to look like an acceptable facsimile of its acceptable appearance.

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Appreciate this material for its fine qualities. In the long run, letting this material function as its authentic self and not as if it were an inferior steel painted to mimic corten will be a much better choice.

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The good news is that even if you have already painted it, you can always revert to the authentic state.