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!
Media blasting is a job that can be quite messy and expensive. Most blasting systems are great if you plan to use it often, but the cost definitely can be overwhelming if you only use it once or twice. Normally you would need a cabinet or a stand-up pressure blaster that requires a large compressor, an efficient air drying system, and loads of media; even if you are just doing a couple small items like valve covers, intake manifolds, etc.
Here at Eastwood we recently released a kit that will allow you to get blasting quicker than ever before. With our new Small Job Media Blasting Kits you can be up and running in no time without the need to invest in a large media blaster or cabinet. If you want to strip and recoat your old parts we suggest coupling the new small job blasting kit with one of our HotCoat Powder Coating Kits. Using the two kits together will get you restoring and coating parts quicker, and more affordably then ever!
As always keep your suggestions coming with your ideas for new products to help you do the job right!
Thanks to all for the amazing response to this year’s contest, and we want to all congratulate Ed S. from Ohio. He is the 2011 winner of our Vegas Dream Ride Contest. I chatted with Ed quickly the other night and he is really excited! Here is a little background on his story.
Ed has been a gearhead since before he could drive, one of his fondest moments was helping his dad do brakes on the family’s 68 Camaro, we’d say that’s a great start! By 17 he had a motorcycle underneath him, and he has never turned back. He has a 68 Camaro, 76 CJ7, and 72 Beetle restorations under his belt, so we’d say he is definitely “one of us”! Ed found out about our contest after purchasing an Eastwood Soda Blaster for his 1984 Harley FLTC Fire-resto project. Since then he has blasted the frame and made use of his large oven at work and our Powder Coating Supplies to get a jump start on his project.
He will have to take a short break from working on his project to come to SEMA for a few days and hang out with the Eastwood crew, go out on the town in Las vegas, and most importantly, drive a bunch of super cars on the Las Vegas Speedway! Check out our live feed on Eastwood.com for pictures, interviews, and a taste of Ed’s Dream Ride experience!
I love getting “deals”, so anytime I can get a deal on an old rare car part, I usually jump on it. I’ve found that there is almost always a reason why the part was a deal. Could be damaged, dirty, incomplete, etc, but normally it is going to require some extra elbow grease. This is especially true with old wheels. Once I’ve determined that they are straight and free of any major damage, I begin to dig in and see how may times they have been painted or powdercoated over. Most of these old aftermarket wheels have a least a few coats of paint or powder on them! In the past I’ve media blasted my wheel parts. This works well, but it is very tedious, time consuming, and often times frustrating if the wheel or part has intricate cutouts or crevices. Even with media blasting, it can be difficult to get in every little nook and cranny to get the old layers of paint and corrosion off.
Recently I came up with a quick, easy, and relatively low-cost way of stripping old painted wheel parts. This is especially good for any of you guys/gals out there without access to a blast cabinet and all of the accessories needed to properly media blast. All you need is enough of our Powder Coat and Paint Dissolver to fully or partially submerge your wheels or parts in, and a cheap trash or recycling bin. These work great for using as little dunk tanks. At the least I like to have my parts halfway suubmerged, then flip them every so often.
This time around, I was doing a set of 4 wheel centers. I chose a narrow, but tall plastic trash can that i could soak 3 at a time in. I used 2 gallons of the dissolver, which allowed me to have 3 centers halfway submerged at all times. As you can see in the picture above, these centers I had started to try and strip before I started this article. I tried using some aerosol paint stripper I got late one rainy night at the local Wal-Mart. Needless to say, I spent an entire evening with brushes, plastic scrapers, etc., and I still barely got 1 1/2 faces stripped (I hadn’t even touched the backsides). That will teach me to be impatient and try and use the incorrect product for the job! So after my frustrating evening with the centers, I brought them here into the shop and submerged them in my make-shift dunk tank.
I let the wheels initially soak for about 15 minutes, at which point I like to (did I mention I can be impatient!) give the dissolver some “help” and rub the areas that were exposed to the dissolver with my (gloved) fingers. Already at this point you should be able to start seeing the color just washing and rubbing right off of the parts. Now, you can just leave the parts in for a longer period of time with no care and it will remove the paint or powder, but I’ve found my method above GREATLY speeds up the process.
Once you resoak the area for 10-15 more minutes, the powder or paint should really just be washing right off. At this point I flip the part, resoak the side that hasn’t been exposed to the dissolver yet, and then repeat the process. The nice thing about stripping parts this way vs. media blasting is that you can really multi-task, and if you are anything like me, you probably have 18 other mini-projects going on in the shop at the same time. This way you don’t need to be strapped to the blaster the entire time the part is getting stripped!
Once I had the majority of the heavy powder/paint off of the centers, I took them to the shop sink and used tap water and a plastic bristle brush to get any small bits of powder out of the crevices in the letters as well as clean the dissolver off of the entire wheel.
After a good rinse, the centers are ready for powder, paint, or polish! Since I previously had some welding and machine work done to the lugs and backing pads of these wheels, I will be powdercoating the faces to get a nice even finish on them.
For clean up, I just grab a funnel and pour the left over dissolver right back into the containers and store them for the next stripping project. I’ve stripped a ton of parts with the batch I am currently using, and it still works great! I hope this quick little process can help some of you save cash stripping off old paint and powder, as well as save you some time!
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.
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