Posts Tagged ‘dual voltage’

What’s cooking in the Eastwood Oven? A weekend of powder coating.

Feb 6th, 12 / 0 Comments

I’m building a few projects at once, and it seems just about every one of them needed some sort of powder coating done before I could start reassembly. I took this past weekend to tackle my growing pile of parts for powder treatment.

There were 2 steps to this process. The first was cleaning the parts with the media blaster. Since I had some large parts that wouldn’t fit in the blasting cabinet, I decided to use a mix of soda blast media and aluminum oxide in the dual blaster to quickly remove the years of paint, rust, and grime on these parts.

An important tip is to sift your media through a strainer before it goes into the blaster. This is your last chance to make sure that there aren’t any pieces of oversized media that weren’t broken down enough. The smallest rogue piece could clog the blaster and cause headaches! This is extremely important if the media isn’t high quality or has been stored in a questionable area where condensation could have gotten to the media. Either way it’s a good habit to form. Sometimes you’d be surprised at what you catch!

Once I blasted all of the parts I treated them with Eastwood After Blast to give them one final cleaning process and optimum powder adherence.

The fun part of this process was finally here, and I started by grabbing my Dual Voltage HotCoat Gun and doing a layer of high gloss black powder followed by hot flocking a layer of ultra gloss clear powder over the parts. This combo is one of my favorites. It really gives an ultra-deep, shiny look to the black that is hard to beat!

Once that batch had cured I moved on to do some engine brackets and other items in black wrinkle. This powder leaves a nice O.E. looking finish that is subtle, yet still clean.

After all of this, I can say I am excited to bolt these freshly coated parts onto each car, I just need to find the time! We want to see what you are powder coating, feel free to share your photos on the Eastwood Powder Coating Forum!

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Matt's Motor head Talk, Tech Corner

HotCoat Wins the Cage Match

Aug 18th, 10 / 0 Comments

As any enthusiast knows, powder coating produces a finish more lustrous and durable than any paint. But, powder coating can also pose some challenges – the part must be stripped down to bare metal and, due to the nature of the process, small recessed areas are practically impossible to coat. Unless you are the proud owner of a HotCoat Dual-Voltage powder coating gun, in which case you sneered and thought, “Ha! Amateurs!” as you read the previous sentence.

The power of the Dual-Voltage gun’s versatility stems from the heart of the powder coating process and involves a fascinating bit of physics. The “powder” in powder coating is actually a mixture of finely ground resin and pigment. The gun ionizes these particles, which are then pushed out of the gun by compressed air and accelerated towards and held onto the part by powerful electrostatic forces. This is half of the reason why you can’t conventionally powder coat wood, plastic, or other materials which act as insulators; the other half is that many plastics will melt when cured in an oven and wood will combust.

The high voltage setting (25,000 V) produces a Faraday Cage effect, an electrostatic condition where charges on the exterior of a surface rearrange themselves to cancel out charges on the interior. This prevents the powder from adhering to the inner, uncharged surfaces in small recessed areas, such as the center of the control arm that we used in this video. However, the effect of the Faraday Cage is reduced as the voltage is lowered –here, from 25,000 V to 15,000 V – because the “strength” of the electric field is proportional to the voltage. If you’re interested in a demonstration of a Faraday cage, you can check out a great demonstration by the folks at MIT’s TechTV here.

Using the Dual-Voltage gun, you simply flip a switch to alternate between the high and low voltage settings. Evan, the newest member of our Eastwood team, and I created a video to show you exactly what sort of power the Dual-Voltage gun brings to the garage. Check it out below (as usual, click here for full 720p goodness).

JR, the mind behind the Dual-Voltage gun, brought in the control arm that you see in the video and it was absolutely filthy – it had been coated with several different substances at various points in its lifetime, including a tough rubberized undercoating. Evan really had his work cut out for him removing these layers so that we could get a surface suitable for powder coating – he alternated between blasting the arm in our blast cabinet and applying Under Gone. After two of these cycles, he blasted the arm one final time, washed it with After Blast, and we were ready to powder. Per JR’s plan for these arms, we used Gloss Black powder.

Enjoy,

Shawn

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Eastwood Chatter

Brake parts need love too!

Mar 8th, 10 / 2 Comments

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I have a 1976 VW Rabbit project that I am building from the ground up. This car is going to be built with a heavy vintage motorsport “feel”, but still in the end, it will be a show car and most everything is going to be gone over and polished, cleaned, chromed and powder coated. One thing people often neglect to restore when building a car is brake parts and associated bits hidden behind the wheel. Since I will be buying new brake calipers, I decided I would clean and powder coat the carriers ahead of time. I figured I’d post some photos along the way of some steps I did for the tech geeks like myself, and also to prove to friends and family I actually do work on my 76 Rabbit more than once every 2 years! (I can hear your laughs from here Dad!)

First step when dealing with old parts that are so close to the road like this, is to clean all of that thick grease, dirt and road grime off of the part. This part had obviously been victim to a couple of ripped CV boots and thus had a few layers of hardened grease on them. You wanna scrape the part with a screwdriver or something similar to get the bigger “chunks” off first. Next I hit the carriers with some of our exclusive Eastwood Chassis Clean . Our chassis clean is a very aggressive cleaner that even removes heavy baked-on brake dust and grease. I just sprayed the part liberally with the handy aerosol can. As you can see in the pictures it just washes the grime off and leaves a “clean” (do not mistake for blasted “clean”) surface!

After getting these parts degreased pretty well. I next dropped them in our blasting cabinet. I decided to use some of our Aluminum Oxide Blast Media to clean the carriers. Since I cleaned the parts with our chassis clean before blasting, the carriers blasted clean quite easily.  After both brackets were blasted, I washed and cleaned them with our PRE Painting Prep to get any and all left over dirt or grease off of the part.

Since these parts were cast, I decided to pre-heat these items at 400 degrees to bake out any additional grease or chemicals that still may be lurking in the metal and could eventually cause “outgassing”. After 20 minutes I took the carriers out and immediately sprayed them Semi-Gloss Black with our increasingly popular Dual Voltage Hot Coat Gun . With the part being pre-heated it makes the powder seem to almost adhere a bit better. You may even begin to see a bit of “flow out” of the powder as the powder lays on the parts (the finish will begin to go from the dull “powder” to a “wet” type finish). After I got a nice even coat on both parts, I took them back to the oven and cured them at 400 degrees again until the powder flowed out nicely. After pulling them out and hanging them to cool, I got to relax and admire the nice glossy black brake parts ready to be mated to some new brake calipers!

I by no means am a professional at powder coating and found the dual voltage gun to be quite easy to use. In fact, I was able to manipulate the amount of powder coming out of the gun depending on the pressure I had on the trigger (vs. some other guns I’ve used where it is either “off” or “full blast”).  Hopefully some of my fellow hobbyists out there will be inclined to take up powder coating their own parts after seeing how fairly simple the process is!

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Matt's Motor head Talk
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