Thread: Powder coating frame versus painting.

Tweet

Last night my Son Dan and I finished up the final pieces of fabrication and welding on his frame. Now we simply have to get it sandblasted and covered with some coating. He is going to go with satin or gloss black on everything, but he wants the frame to be perfect, which means filling all the imperfections with some sort of filler and lots of sanding before the final coating goes on. That is where we are on the fence.

He has considered having it powder coated, even though the process leaves a little texture. That is fine, but where we are confused is what the steps should be and what products to use. As we understand it, here is how it would go:

1) Have frame sandblasted to clean the metal.

2) Use some sort of filler such as Lab Metal or All Metal to fill the imperfections, then DA it all until it is smooth. (We understand Lab Metal will withstand higher Powder Coating temps, but is tougher to sand. All Metal can be used, but your coater needs to go no more than maybe 250 degrees on the curing process.)

3) Then the coater sandblasts the frame again prior to the actual coating process to give it some tooth. (Does this screw up the Lab or All Metal you have used to smooth the frame?)

4) Finally, the frame is coated and baked.


We just recently used powder coating for the first time to have Dan's wheels done.........we like the results. We have always spray painted everything, but this new frame has so many nooks and crannies that we would have a hard time getting even coverage into all of them. There are also 50 holes we drilled, and each one of those is the potential for a run, especially using black paint which is heavy. We even considered having the body shop that painted Dons T and my T bodies do the frame, but we fear they might not understand that a frame on a fenderless car has to be as good as the body.

I know someone on here (maybe Ken) posted that he sometimes sands and paints over powder coating in areas he wants to be really good, but how do you get the paint to be a perfect match for the areas you leave coated?

We are going to call the coater tomorrow to ask some of these questions, but I felt some of you on here might be able to give us your experience with having a frame coated. The part that has us most confused is the Lab Metal or All Metal procedure, so any advice any of you might have on that would be great.

Here is the frame, and as you can see, there are a lot of areas that will be tough to reach with conventional painting methods. Thanks in advance guys.

Don