About 2 months ago I purchased a new powder-coating gun off of ebay and forgot about it for awhile while I was waiting on the various colored powders to come in...

Well, Friday they showed up. Mirror Gloss Black, Gloss White and Translucent Blue along with some silicone plugs and caps so...

Having never power coated anything before, I took an old leaf-spring shackle, sandblasted it and sprinkled all three of the colors in different areas on it with the blade of a small screwdriver and heated it to 400 degrees for 14 minutes. After cooling off, all of the colors were "baked on" with an extremely high gloss. I was VERY impressed.

Now to the "torture test". I took the sharp tip of a screwdriver and tried to scrape off the powder coating... No luck, it was almost as if it was a part of the metal now! On top of my repeated attempts, it still held its gloss to boot!

Off to the sandblaster... Let me just say that as much as I love my sandblaster, I'll never (even as a favor) offer to take powder coating off of anything! It STICKS! After about 30 minutes of blasting with sand, I was almost able to see bare metal but some of the powder coating remained. If you want a durable finish, this is IT!

Ok, so up until now the powder-coating gun has remained in the box (all the previous stuff was just sprinkling the powder on the part with a screwdriver blade, then curing it).

Out with the "gun", power supply and air hose (max 15 psi on this stuff, 12psi worked best for me!) and an old set of Maverick 302 engine to frame mounts. After blasting the parts to bare metal, I blew off any sand with the air hose and rigged up my wire parts hangers (DAB knows ALL about my setup ).

You have to plug the unit in, connect the air hose to the gun, adjust for about 12psi of air pressure and ground the part with a wire connected to an alligator clip. Although you can "spray" with just pressure, it won't stick to the part unless you depress the foot switch (which controls the high voltage going to the gun). I forgot this at first and was miffed that nothing seemed to stick to the part and black powder-coating dust was floating in the air. THEN (without blowing powder) I depressed the foot switch and all of the airborne powder that was just floating around was drawn to the engine mount like a magnet! Having now got the hang of it, I gave both mounts a total of about 5 seconds of "blow" from the powder coating gun. Because the gun is high voltage and the part is grounded, the powder flies to the part immediately. It seems that the "uncoated" areas tend to attract the powder more than the parts already coated (try THAT with a spray can!).

Now confused because it had taken so very little time to coat the parts (it took more time to set up than to coat!) I carefully picked up the mounts from the hangers with needle nose pliers that I extended in a mounting hole and laid them on an aluminum foil covered baking pan. Since the over was already pre-heated to 400 degrees I just plopped them in, set the timer to 20 minutes and walked away...

Ding! The timer went off. I grabbed my non-contact IR thermometer, pointed it at the mounts while they were still in the oven and verified that they were at least 330 degrees (mine reached 382) and pulled out the backing pan to let them cool...

Whoa! Talk about a high-gloss shine! The mounts are as smooth as glass and look show-quality to the extreme! The place I spoke with says that even after you cure them, you can re-coat them with a clear-coat powder to "deepen" the shine even more although I can't see why anyone would need to do this!

My '76 Maverick "Pegasus" doesn't know it yet, but she's in a new teardown to powdercoat damned near everything! The old "paint in a can", while nice, can't resist scratches, etc. In addition the powder-coated finish is a life-long gloss that wont come off.

Although I consider myself an accomplished painter, I can't compare with the powder coating results! How many times have you spray-painted a part to perfection only to scratch up the finish putting it in? I can only speak for myself and it has been one too many times!

Here is a picture, with the sears thermometer in the middle. Sorry about the lighting, not good but you can see the gloss anyways!

Regards,
Tracy