painting over powder coating
- Thread starter gorilla
- Start date
It may not be the correct thing to do, but in my experience powder makes good primer, even better if the powder had primer applied before it was coated. I prep it just like I'm prepping something that's primered, I knock it down but I don't clean it with anything stronger than mineral spirits. This has all been on race car chassis and brackets and what not, no show cars, YMMV.
isb cornbinder
Well-known member
Yes, you can.
Back in the old days, it was common with many vehicle manufacturers to use something called pot-metal to make diecast metal parts. These parts were often chrome plated and became bright-work trim.
The big problem with this pot-metal was something called off-gassing. The gas would get trapped behind the chrome and cause the chrome to bubble and lift. The trapped moisture was often an electrolyte because it was from road splash. Salts and other metals were present.
I thought, if a person were to heat cycle the pot-metal parts several times the gas problem would cease to exist. I spent about 100 hours carefully removing the chrome and detailing the grill before the next step.
I took the grill and headlight bezels to a powder coater and asked them to hang my parts on a rack and cycle the parts several times over a day, with other customer parts. My grill and headlight parts were the last parts to get coated with a powder primer. When I picked up the parts, they were still very warm.
The grill and bezels were painted Medium Wedgewood Blue at the same time the car was painted.
More than a decade has passed, and the grill and bezels paint are perfect.
I took a bit of a risk with this. The new grill from Bob Drake Reproductions was $1329.99usd and the bezels were$154.75usd. Our dollar was at 75 cents usd at that time. I could have ended up with a $2000cdn pile of dust, but I had to try.
I do not like chrome, except for the occasional badge. The red halo around the FORD script is from the red edges of the script reflecting in the paint of the car.
My son and I pin-striped all of the stainless in red. This toned down the brightness.
Back in the old days, it was common with many vehicle manufacturers to use something called pot-metal to make diecast metal parts. These parts were often chrome plated and became bright-work trim.
The big problem with this pot-metal was something called off-gassing. The gas would get trapped behind the chrome and cause the chrome to bubble and lift. The trapped moisture was often an electrolyte because it was from road splash. Salts and other metals were present.
I thought, if a person were to heat cycle the pot-metal parts several times the gas problem would cease to exist. I spent about 100 hours carefully removing the chrome and detailing the grill before the next step.
I took the grill and headlight bezels to a powder coater and asked them to hang my parts on a rack and cycle the parts several times over a day, with other customer parts. My grill and headlight parts were the last parts to get coated with a powder primer. When I picked up the parts, they were still very warm.
The grill and bezels were painted Medium Wedgewood Blue at the same time the car was painted.
More than a decade has passed, and the grill and bezels paint are perfect.
I took a bit of a risk with this. The new grill from Bob Drake Reproductions was $1329.99usd and the bezels were$154.75usd. Our dollar was at 75 cents usd at that time. I could have ended up with a $2000cdn pile of dust, but I had to try.
I do not like chrome, except for the occasional badge. The red halo around the FORD script is from the red edges of the script reflecting in the paint of the car.
My son and I pin-striped all of the stainless in red. This toned down the brightness.
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mark-NJ
Well-known member
My dad was in the powder-coating business and what I learned over the years is that the answer is "maybe".
"Powder coat" doesn't tell the whole story: there's nylon powder (several kinds), there's vinyl powder, there's epoxy powder, etc. and they will all behave differently when you try to manipulate them for subsequent metal finishing.
Without knowing what type of polymer (powder) was applied to the metal, it's a bit like asking "Can I glue wood?" The kneejerk answer is "sure", but in reality it depends on the wood type & depends on the glue type. And so it is with powder-coated finishes.
"Powder coat" doesn't tell the whole story: there's nylon powder (several kinds), there's vinyl powder, there's epoxy powder, etc. and they will all behave differently when you try to manipulate them for subsequent metal finishing.
Without knowing what type of polymer (powder) was applied to the metal, it's a bit like asking "Can I glue wood?" The kneejerk answer is "sure", but in reality it depends on the wood type & depends on the glue type. And so it is with powder-coated finishes.