Powder coating is much stronger than paint, it stands up to solvents, and it’s much more chip resistant, but you have to take the stuff to a professional powder coater and wait for it to be finished, and it’s not cheap. So, we talked to the people at Eastwood who make the Hot Coat home powder coat system. We’ve seen this advertised in magazines and stuff for years but we always wondered if it really works, is it difficult, and do you actually get results that rival professional powder coating? We tried it and we’re here to say that if we can do it and make the stuff look good, then pretty much anybody can.

We checked our local newspaper and found a beautiful used electric oven for about $20.00. Eastwood recommends you use an electric oven over a gas, they also recommend that you don’t use the oven for cooking once you’ve used it for a powder coating application.

Our first powder coat test victim was a control arm from our Camaro chassis. It’s already been cleaned with Eastwood PRE, an aerosol wax and grease remover… Eastwood stresses that the parts you powdercoat must be completely clean. The first step in the process is to pour your selected powder into a container which attaches to the powder coating applicator gun. You want to be careful that you use high temperature plugs or the supplied high temperature masking tape to make sure that you don’t get powder in areas that have tight machine tolerances like threads or in carburetor jets, etc.

A trick to doing this is to take the oven rack out of the oven and used the supplied stainless steel wire to suspend your part from the oven rack. This way, you don’t have to worry about your part touching a flat surface and not getting even coverage. The next thing to do is to take the negative lead from the Hot Coat controller and clip it to one of the pieces of stainless wire. Ideally you want this clipped onto something that’s going touch bare metal. This will negatively charge the part and then allow the powder to cling to it because the electrostatic technique draws the powder to the part so that it’s covered uniformly. Next, put some safety gear on, plug an air supply into our gun and coat it.

The next step is to physically apply the powder. This is done by first pressing the power button and then pulling the trigger on the gun and you’ll notice that the powder just simply billows out from the end of the applicator gun and clouds around the part. It will automatically form a nice uniform layer, and it covers everything on its own. You don’t have to worry about drips or sags or a build-up of powder, and it doesn’t use a whole lot of powder to cover most parts. The nice thing is there are no solvents involved so when you clean up, everything just blows off with an air gun.

Once your parts are coated, carefully slide the oven rack into the preheated oven. They recommend about 450 degrees for 15-20 minutes or until the powder flows out nicely and has a chance to melt together. The powder gets melted together into a uniform solid coating. You’ve got to let your parts cool, and then you take them out of the oven and you’re done. That’s all there is to it. You just apply the powder, bake the parts, and its finished.

So simple, even we can do it. The whole process can be done from start to finish in as little as 45 min to an hour if you’re really on it. Clean up with a powder coat system is really easy, you just take the unused powder out of the gun and pour it back into the reservoir and then all you have to do is blow everything off with an air gun and you’re finished. The results speak for themselves. These control arms were just bare steel. With a little application of Eastwood Argent Silver, they came out of the oven looking like they just came back from a plating shop. It’s not quite as clean as chrome, but we didn’t really want them to look chrome plated. We like the fact they’ve got a creamy silver reflective surface to it.

We also tried a high gloss black on some steering arms which again gave us just dramatic results. All of the hardware and fasteners and spherical rod ends on our suspension parts came with a gold zinc plating, and we were able to match that with some gold powder.

You can check the Eastwood catalog or their website to find a whole variety of different types of powders. They have solid colors and candy colors, metallic, specialty coatings like wrinkle coats and things that last under real high temperature situations. It’s perfect for doing brackets and things on an engine and parts under the car, because standard powder coat is good for up to 250 degrees of continuous use once it’s cured.

So overall, we were very impressed with the Eastwood Hot Coat system. The gun and the kit costs right around $100.00 and the results came out perfect. We couldn’t be happier and we were impressed that knuckle heads like us could get it done.

If you have a big part like an entire chassis or rear end housing or a whole lot of parts, you’re still going to want to take those to a professional powder coater, but if you’ve got some small pieces and you have an oven, there is nothing stopping you from getting those same results in your own shop.

SOURCES

Eastwood

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