Polane? Great stuff, practically bullet proof, but expensive and nasty to apply.
At the risk of sounding like I'm proposing a cheap ass alternative, here's a cheap ass alternative that I've found very satisfactory.
I've frequently used home center 2 part epoxy bathtub paint where you get a quart kit for $16 or so. It's very durable and with good brush technique you a nice flat finish with good gloss. You only have to buy small quantities and you can get any color you want so long as it's white or almond. Every machine tool should look like an appliance.
You can also tint it using the appropiate tinting colors found at a real paint store so long as you like grays and pastels. The kit makers also offer a few saturated colors but they'd likely have to be special ordered. YMMV
You can also buy an epoxy tint base and break it down into quarts for later tinting. I buy S/W or B/M industrial coatings and have them divide a gallon unto 6 one quart cans. The remaining space is about the right amount for the hardener. That way I can tint only what I need.
I'm also quite fond of DuPont Emron coatings. They come in a variety of standard colors and hand brush very well giving good coverage.
A lot of guys insist on spray painting which always involves time-consuming elaborate prep and masking. I suggest good technique and reasonable brushes are nearly as good as spray painting and you don't need 10% of the masking and you don't have to turn your shop into a toxic spill site. Remember, we're talking machine tools not show cars or $100,000 choppers.
For example, I brush painted a customer 42" Bullard Cutmaster giving it three coats of pale blue alkyd paint over the existing prep system which I only cleaned, buil-up, and sanded a bit for appearance and adhesion. Allowance for a hard cure meant a few days between coats for good between-coat sanding. I hardly masked anything except label plates and dials.
By the time I got the brick red and international orange spraycan accents and stripes on the machine, it looked like a million bucks instead of a lick and a promise rebuild. The customer was thrilled. It took time but 70 hours less than bid by the auto painter my boss usually used and we didn't have to built a blue tarp spray booth. Not to take anything away from that pro painter. I couldn't qualify the carry his pressure pot.
It's just that machine tools are machine tools and their paint systems are subject to chipwash, coolant, wrenched banging on them, and abuse. So why gold plate the paint system? Use a paint system you can easily touch up.
[This message has been edited by Forrest Addy (edited 10-26-2003).]