Anyone have any experience in do it yourself powder-coating? OR is it just better to take em to the pro's?
I want to powder-coat several small brackets, springs, etc to help with detail.
I have heard once you cure in an over you never want to use that oven again for anything but powder-coating???
I would like to learn how to powdercoat one of these days but can't help you much. Once you use an oven to powdercoat it is unsafe to use for food because of the gases released from the coating process.
I found a place just couple miles from work http://www.custompowdercoating.com/
Might just have to drop off a few pieces with them and see how they turn out.
Says on their website "Hold your monthly car club meeting at our shop! We can give your members a powder coating "tech" seminar".
Anyone have any interest to ride out and check them out with me????
I would love to check them out. I have some stuff I need to get powder coated. To bad they/you aren't closer.
A friend and I have been kicking around the idea of building a powdercoating setup with one of those cheap Harbor Freight guns and a home built oven big enough to do frames.
I have a friend who is into powder coating. He's a totally nerdy engineer (I mean that in a good way) and quite fluent in cheap DIY. He uses an old toaster oven that I think he trashpicked, for smaller parts. And for larger parts he actually uses an electric grill element mounted on an old microphone stand. He simply positions it to appropriately heat up the surface and then powder coats it.
As far as I know he has had great success with these two techniques.
I plan to powder coat the the decorative fins on my Magna, perhaps even this weekend, because I have them off the bike. I will let you know how it goes. My friend doesn't act like it's rocket science, but this is also the same guy who bought $120 leaf blower from a guy at a garage sale because it didn't work, and then he fixed it right there with his swiss army knife. That was too funny. You should've see the other guy's face. He actually thought it was pretty funny too, but I bet inside he felt like a dope.
I found and old email from my friend.
In addition to Harbor Freight, here's where he gets a lot of his powder coating supplies:
http://www.eastwood.com/
He says the regular powder coating is good to about 300 degrees while the high heat coating will go to 1,000.
Greg, I'm interested in going, let me know when you want to go.
Here is the powdercoat oven (http://www.powdercoatoven.4t.com/) that we have been kicking around for a while. It uses old home oven heating elememt. We figured we could build the enitre oven for less than $200.00 at the time.
Greg check out Sears they have a pretty nice system and they sell the powder to go with it. Around here folks throw away stoves. get rid of the top burners and a trip to the car wash and when you get thru powder coating throw it away.