Wednesday Wisdom EP - 14 Powder Coating Pretreatment

Wisdom Wednesday, let's do this guys, I just want to get into my own video like I did in the last one and remind you that we're offering memberships now on our Patreon page. There is a link below as well as in our YouTube membership. page where you can register, place or do both if you really want to help us and there are some advantages, like you have direct access to me, we will not answer as many questions on this site or in the emails we receive. Many days it just kills my workflow here, unfortunately I mean we want to help you, but if you become a member we will contact you right away, you will have full access to us for any technical support questions. equipment questions all that kind of stuff so check them out and help us help you so let's get back to it guys we're going to talk about how we prepare parts how we talk to our customers about how they want their parts. prepared and all that kind of stuff so I have to close this door here it's getting a little windy the temperature isn't that bad we've been in the 70s 80s the last three days which is pretty good for Iowa um making sure there's no nothing under the door, which is pretty good for Iowa in early April, so we have a couple of cars here that we're working on, we have this truck back here that came in, it's actually chrome rims that were repeated, um , they had plasti dip, so we took all the plasti dip off of them and what we told the customer was that we will not be responsible for the adhesion of our paint because we are putting it on really bad chrome, there were pits and everything, they are dusty, but you can see all the pit marks, so that's what you see when you put a coat on chrome, we don't like to do it, this guy begged us, begged us, told us he didn't care about the finish, he just wanted which was overall attractive from a distance, it's not a bad looking truck, but the way we prepare the chrome is we sand it as best we can and then use 220 grit sandpaper because when we are sometimes spraying the chrome, it just doesn't hit those corners and radii like you want, so we'll go back and hit it with sandpaper when you talk to the customer about a chrome job if you're going to do it.

To take something like this, you want to talk to them about all the pitting and peeling because you can spend more time polishing all of that out so it's smooth and looks good. This guy wanted to put minimal effort into these things. I wanted them clean and looking good because, um, the plasti dip and stuff was coming off, you can see the lids are still dipped in plastic, we're not going to play with that, but that's talking to the customer to find out what their ultimate goal with this. um and going from there to these painted wheels um, we'll remove them, we'll put them in the remover, they'll come out with um and these, actually, you can tell they were painted before, it's someone who made a sidewalk.

Rushed repair painted it and did a horrible job because they didn't scrape the wheel enough for the paint to adhere and I see this all the time, if you really start looking you can see the clarity of it, it's not very nice. and then the corners are breaking off and then someone must have had a lock nut because it's all chewed up so they didn't know how to remove it without damaging it. It's a lot of fun, so I wonder if the four wheels look good. That way, yeah, all four wheels, so we'll do our best to sand all that down, but to prep the aluminum wheels, our typical process takes them off, then we'll put them in the oven to remove the gas.

We do about 450 for at least an hour a day. A lot of times we put them in at night, set the oven timer for two hours, make sure they're completely degassed, then we sand them, wash them with a ready-made dish soap and then we'll dry them in the oven after rinsing them and then we're going to coat them when we're doing shiny black. I like to start hot plating them about 175 180. We'll start with the nuts, work on all the pockets and then we'll go back and hit the flats on all the faces and then we'll go back and do the drum and the barrel on the back and then we'll go back and we'll remove the dust from the face and that's how we get our black to look perfect.

Pretty simple, if the customer wants a primer you can do a primer or if the customer wants a clear coat over their black to help prevent some scratches we could do that too but again it's just a matter of talking to them to determine how much they want spend, um and what else do you want? You know, as far as durability and all that kind of stuff, um, bare metal parts, we're going to talk about that, so if you guys are getting into what we have, I think we've already met thousands of these bad boys. . coated with a couple hundred um generally they're just greasy and dirty so what we're going to do is hang them on our cart we actually have a custom cart for it these rods usually hang here and we'll hang about 50 on the cart we made it so you can go in and spray everywhere right now these are production parts for a target system, but we prepared them the same way we prepared these other parts and here we ended up like we made a makeshift screen here so as not to spray water everywhere, our stores are full and small so we don't have much space to have a wash bay, but what we will do is hang it here.

We have a degreaser here, it's actually like we've tried a few different ones, they all work pretty well, but if you dilute it a little bit, degrease, the piece cleans all the oils you know and that kind of stuff. so we'll spray it if we need to, we have these green scotch pads and we'll actually scrub the parts that are super dirty. Some of these gas tanks we make are like a gas carrying tank. the guy sprays some anti-spatter on it and we have to clean them, scrub them real good and then we grab our hot pressure washer that's on the floor, we turn on the heat, we go out, we rinse them on the rack and then we'll come back and grab our phosphate right now, we're using Columbia

coating

s phosphate all prepared just mix it up as it says that's all you have to do so we mix it in our sprayer we spray it.

For the part we wait about 30 seconds and then rinse it with hot water. If you leave it on too long, it will be like a white film that after it dries, you can wipe it off, but make sure to blow it off. the dull part, so it doesn't have fibers or anything, that worked pretty well for us, we've talked to the guys, like a little bit, the chemical company, I think I said right about doing an injection, we just haven't done it. I got there but this is working pretty well for us so far, we do all our raw steel production stuff and they just want a nice clean finish, they want it cheap and they want it fast so that's what's in it. all these bars and you can look, they look pretty good, I'll show you how they look raw because we put them in all kinds of conditions, they're pretty clean a lot of times, when we put these bars in, they're rusty and stuff, so when you spray them The phosphate in there will actually start to clean up some of this rust.

Here you can see how dirty they are, but that's why we degrease it and then the phosphate is going to start attacking this rust and we're going to take another whiskey brite and we're just going to clean the rust with the phosphate in there and then we're going to rinse them all off and they're ready to go, so these are all the parts we cover and all our doors are open and it's windy and dusty and all that, so we're going to cover all our parts here, but they were all done exactly the same way, with degreasing, phosphate rinse, a lot of these parts that we like, steel motorcycle parts and things that we are going to make. put a base on them and then we'll do this it's a candy I think it's an illusion it's not a candy it's a cherry illusion so you put on the gel base coat and apply the clear coat um these are the parts that I was showing you're there so We have a couple hundred here, but they turn out very well, so the system works well for us.

I hope you can take advantage of that a little bit on your still parts if you're putting on a primer. In it, we recommend a zinc primer. If you are doing it in aluminum, we recommend an epoxy primer. We actually have our zinc primer here on our old kci gun, we just left it as a primer but then we also have. I don't think I have it yet, we just ordered more. There is a driver, I don't see him here. A conductive primer that we use if you're doing three stages where you're doing like a primer. a base coat, a mid coat and a top coat, so you're actually putting four on, that conductive primer helps with your adhesion, makes the paint stick and all that kind of stuff, hopefully that will help them a little bit , that's a lot. of information on how we prepare the parts, you know, we have two different standards, but then it's what the customer wants, they want durability, they want cheap, they want a high-end finish, you know, so you just have to talk to them. and find out all that and this video is getting a lot longer than I intended so I'm going to let you guys go be sure to check out the notes below.

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