Essential tips to buy colour-coated sheets

Colour-coated steel or pre-painted steel is a bare metal substrate that has a decorative coating applied to it. This coating protects the steel from atmospheric corrosion while enhancing its strength and durability. 

Colour-coated steel is widely used for applications in buildings, furniture, home appliances, and other industries. The thickness of the colours coated on these sheets varies as per the usage. Due to their lightweight, these sheets are often easy to install. Unlike other sheets, they don't bend and don't exert pressure on roofs.  

How to choose a colour-coated steel sheet?

 In addition to meeting usage requirements, appropriate materials can help you reduce your expenses. The mechanical qualities, substrate and coating thickness, top and back painting kinds, and performance are all factors to consider when choosing colour-coated steel sheets.

Let us look at these factors in detail.

1. Always ask for a test certificate - A test certificate comes in handy to ensure the sheets' quality. Therefore, you should always ask your supplier for a manufacturer test certificate when buying colour-coated sheets.

2. Substrate type and coating thickness - Application, user environment, and durability are the primary determinants of substrate type and coating thickness. For instance, due to their outstanding corrosion resistance, hot-dip galvanised, and galvalume sheets are frequently used as substrates for colour-coated sheets for construction. A thick coating can improve durability and lengthen its useful life in extremely corrosive situations. 

3. Galvanised or Galvalume sheets - The consumer must carefully consider whether the sheets are galvanised or galvalume before purchasing them from the market for their pre-engineered steel building project. For many years, these sheets have been available on the market. Galvanised sheets with 345 MPA, such as GI 90 and GI 120, are still widely available. 

However, nowadays, Galvalume sheets are  gaining popularity. Galvalume sheets are available in two grades, AZ 70 and AZ 150. Consumers can use AZ 70 for retail applications; however, we advise customers to use AZ 150 coating sheets for industrial projects. You can explore the best quality AZ 70 (JSW Pragati Plus) and AZ 150 (JSW Colouron+) colour-coated steel on www.jswonemsme.com,as per your profile preferences (Trapezoidal or Mangalore tiled). 

4.  Paint thickness - The colour-coated sheet's corrosion resistance and paint thickness are closely connected. In general, corrosion resistance improves with paint thickness. Hence it is essential to evaluate the thickness of the paint on the colour-coated sheets. While the application and preference have the most significant impact on the coating's gloss. For construction purposes, low gloss and matte surfaces are preferable, but appliances for the home prefer gloss or high gloss colour-coated steel.

 Tips for transportation, storage, and processing.

1. The sheets should have their surface intact during transit, loading and unloading, storage, or processing. It should also be stored in a tidy space away from corrosive agents.

2. The strap locks should be facing up, and the coils should be mounted on rubber pads, skids, brackets, and other accessories.

3. It is advised to apply a protective film during processing to products coated with polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) to prevent the coating from peeling off.

4. In order to avoid improper deformation of the steel sheets or to peel off the coating after the profile, the rollers, corrugated patterns, and steel grades should be correctly matched during profiling.

We hope that these tips will be helpful for you when buying colour-coated sheets. We have also written a detailed blog about the types of colour-coated steel sheets here.  You can read on to find out more about colour-coated steel sheets.