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Guess I should consider myself lucky. The shop I use is good, quick (usually a week or less) and reasonably priced. Best of all they're close, 9 miles away.
I was a co-owner of the largest powder coating job shop in the SE from 1977 to 1987. We had 25,000 sq ft facility with a several ovens, a 400' conveyor line, a 3-stage phosphate spray washer, dip tanks and fluid beds, along with two spray boots with 8 guns. We coated everything from outdoor furniture to over 50,000 windshield wipe blades per day for a company called Pylon. The key to a lasting finish is proper pre-treatment and adequate cure time that cures the most dense or thickest part without over baking the thinner material. There are two conditions that must be met to achieve proper cure of a powder coating. Time and temperature. The time/temperature requirements of a particular powder - epoxy, polyester or hybrids must be achieved to obtain a full cure. A cured thermoset powder coating will not re-melt upon further heating. Most large PC use a datapag to determine the correct time/temp. Sandblasting is not always the best route to go when preparing a part for coating. Iron and/or zinc conversion coatings deposits a coating on the piece that provides surface that is more adhesive and corrosion resistant. To test for how clean a part is you can use a"water break free" test. Basically this test if water fully sheets over the clean part or draws away from portions of the surface, There are more sophisticated tests as well. To test for a properly cured coating one can do a cross hatch test on a sample part. Finally epoxy powders do not take a second coat very well as opposed to polyesters, so simply re-coating is not the best way to go. Stripping the part and starting over is recommended. When done right powder coating is one of the best coatings to apply, but when not prepared properly or under-cured, failures happen and the coating can chip off under the slightest impact, bubble up from corrosion or flake. Just thought you guys should have a little info prior to taking your parts to a PC, since there are some that do it right and some that just do it.
Great thread, a little old, but I think it's perfect for a question so I'll post my question here:Are there any issues with heating metal parts for powdercoating? The reason I ask is that I want to powdercoat the side stand "police stand" on my G5, but it seems to be made of some sort of tempered metal. Would baking it pre and post powdercoating weaken the stand? I'm already paranoid using the side stand as it seems to hold quite of bit of weight when the bike is leaning like that, so the idea of powdercoating it is making even more nervous - maybe I should just paint it...What are the thoughts on this? Also, is baking the powdercoat at a lower temp or using InfraRed light bulbs valid options on not messing with the metal's temper state, but still getting a good finish?Thanks for any advice on this matter!
The poster who mentioned doing a sandblasted frame for $100 -- I'd take a look at his oven before I committed to a $100 frame job. A frame is 'large' for a powdercoater. An oven large enough to handle it would be really expensive. At $100 the shop is probably losing money if they have the right equipment. More likely they're doing it in an open room with either a heat gun or heat lamps to cure it, and since the lights and timers and trollys and such for proper heat lamp curing are also quite expensive, I question if they've even got that.
I think the reason is that the side stand came from a different source than the frame, and based on the variances I see in finish, workmanship, and styles of feet and retractor 'helpers' they come from many sources. Some are exact copies of the HD version -- and probably made by the same outfit. My personal feeling about the off-silver ones v black is that the silver ones are easier to notice out of the corner of your eye in the dark. That can be handy.
Figure a 'nominal' temperature @400ºf, and a 'nominal' time of 15 minutes with the PART (not the oven) at temp. There are powders that vary in temp and time. To finish prep we 'outgass' the part at temp or above for at least the amount of time the powder will be curing. The idea is that anything that's going to boil out of the metal during coating will have already flashed. If this step isn't done you can get pits, pimples, and blisters in the coating.So any metal you coat must be able to withstand this treatment. I wouldn't worry a bit about the sidestand. The poster who mentioned doing a sandblasted frame for $100 -- I'd take a look at his oven before I committed to a $100 frame job. A frame is 'large' for a powdercoater. An oven large enough to handle it would be really expensive. At $100 the shop is probably losing money if they have the right equipment. More likely they're doing it in an open room with either a heat gun or heat lamps to cure it, and since the lights and timers and trollys and such for proper heat lamp curing are also quite expensive, I question if they've even got that. Now a GOOD shop will also use heat lamps to cure a large part like a trailer frame, but they have it in a controlled booth with the lights on a trolly timed to keep the metal at the right temp for the right time. So don't think that just because heat lamps are used the job will be inferior.We've got a nut job in town who claims to be a powdercoater. He's the same guy that had a tank of mine 'next on his list' for over a year. This guy sprays the powder in the grease bay and cures the parts in a gym locker with a hotplate in the bottom. He has no facilities for prepping or decontaminating parts, no process control, and the gym locker has vents that let cold, dirty air blow through whenever the shop bay doors are open. His jobs look like hammered horseshit, but don't last as long as a pile of horse apples. I suspect he's they guy who bid your $100 job.By contrast, my oven is 42 x 42 x 38, sealed, double-walled and insulated. It is a diy job that cost about $250 in bought parts. It has 1.6Kw of heating coils and a process controller that regulates the temperature within one degree (f) of target, ramps the heat up evenly, and stops it on time. The interior will swing a 36" cube and has an arrangement of hangers and brackets to jig up all sorts of odd shapes. It's a big box, but it's limited to a couple of wheels, one tank, two fenders, etc on account of you need to get the stuff into the box without touching it or it touching anything else, and you need to hang it at as uniform a distance from the heat source as possible for even temperature throughout the part. One bump and you're back in the booth fixing it. One end hanging too close to the heat and the finish gloss is uneven.