Why is Small Powder Coating Machine Better?

Powder coating is a process that uses fine powders to give a clean and extremely durable finish to products. A powder coating system encompasses each step of the process, from the cleaning stage to the coating stage so a piece is then ready to be put into a curing oven.

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Here at Belco, we offer both batch and conveyor processes, and our cost-efficient “Paint Shop To Go”. To learn more about how your company can benefit from a powder coating system, keep reading.

Batch Processes vs. Conveyor Processes

When deciding which powder coating system is right for your business, make sure you know the key advantages of each.

A powder coating conveyor system is great for working with large quantities of product. This system moves faster than the batch process and allows companies to powder coat a vast amount of materials.

Batch systems are more suitable for small and lower volume part demands, though. If your company works on more of a case-by-case basis with individual clients, a batch process powder coating system might be right for you.

With batch processes, the operation is slower but can offer more attention to fine details. Small parts, hidden corners, and complicated pieces are better treated with this system.

At Belco, all our powder coating systems will provide years of reliable service. If your company handles both large orders and niche demands, we’re happy to help service both your powder coating system needs.

Contact us to discuss your requirements of Small Powder Coating Machine. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.

Higher Quality Finishes

As a distributor, you’ll want customers to come back to you time and time again. The best way to do that is to provide them with the highest quality products on the market, otherwise, they’ll find them from someone else.

Powder coating your products ensures their quality too. With a proper cleaning and coating process, powder-coated products have a high resistance to chemicals, UV rays, and water damage. All of the powder coating systems we offer here at Belco are complete turnkey systems designed to exceed your manufacturing requirements, stay within budget, and minimize floor space.

Old to New

When you offer a finishing system like powder coating, you offer your clients a chance to bring the past back to life.

Old furnishings, appliances, lawn furniture, and so much more can go from trash to treasure with powder coating. As your powder coating systems provider, we offer multiple ways to accommodate this. One of which is again our “Paint Shop To Go,” which is perfect for cost-conscious customers who can handle self-installation.

Powder Versatility

With a powder coating system, you can offer your clients a lot of options. From coating color, texture, and finishes, you have a wide variety of possibilities that customers like to see.

This also means you don’t have to involve a third party if your client wants a specific look or feel to their piece. With an in-house powder coating system, your company becomes an all-in-one service shop for clients.

The Curing Oven

At Belco, we also offer curing ovens for after you add the powder coating. Each of our curing ovens are individually designed so we can meet all of your production needs. The curing oven is where the powder coat gets bonded with the material it was added to. Every curing oven from Belco will help save on energy while maximizing productivity.

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Does anyone here do small scale powder coating. Were looking for a through put of about a couple of hundred to a thousand brackets a month. Brackets are tiny sheet metal components. Sub 2" square but of at least 12 diffrent sizes - shapes. So far the commercial powder coaters we approached have not been interested - too costly due to the fiddly little nature of the bits. Add in the travel time of taking them there - brining them back and it gets hideously costly fast for what they are.

Currently we aerosol tin spray them with primer then top coat. There all the same colour - satin black (no option of changing finish, can't plate already been discussed to death with customer). There's adhesion issues and were going through spray tins like no tomorrow! We need to get away from wet painting them, its just not working. Its messy, smelly and slow. Drying times a major pain!

Due to the nature of what the parts are the painting cost is always going to be a significant part of the bit coast and this is factored in. Currently were doing ok money wise on them, it just would be nice to get a better result for the amount of effort that gets put in.

Racking and unracking them is not a issue labour wise. Its a 2 hour round trip to the nearest powder coaters, even if they would show some interest! Hence there's a lot of time lost regardless of them not wanting to do them (there all set up for lower qtys - larger items). There price is currently about triple what our costs are to make - paint them ourselves. Our customer would not accept that kinda increase.

Hence were exploring the option of doing these in house. What were ideally after is a basic - simple set-up that can ideally live on a pallet that we can stick out of the way when its not needed. We don't even need a high speed process. If it took a 8h day to run say 500 that currently would not be a major issue. Equally we don't even need perfect results. Also the parts are all standardised - won't be changing hence we could run a lot more less frequently if that works out more efficiently.

So does any one here do this sort of coating and what's the pit falls? Equally there's a lot of progressively larger parts we make that also get coated. Hence there's potential to grow this significantly with just our own work. Powder seams dirt cheep for the coverage and energy costs ain't much for the sizes were considering here. adama,

I don't know if you have the equivalent of that Co we are not to mention (HF), but look here: Powder Coat Oven 500 USD for in 18" cube inside dim oven. Here: 16 Oz. Powder Coat Paint, Matte Black for a 70 USD powder gun, and 4 USD per pound of powder.

600 USD you could give it a try. OR,you could look into a better system, and I know they are out there, but way more expensive. Try this and see if you can make money.

According to this: Powder coating - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Wiki article, the powder is reclaimable and reusable, which you can't do with that rattle can.

I know nothing about it, the only time I ever saw it done was at the GE Factory in Louisville, Kentucky, on washing machine and electric range panels.

One feature of it, I think, is that being electrostatic, you could devise racks to hold however many parts you can, and don't have to orient the piece to aim your rattle can nozzle at. It wraps itself about the piece.

You mentioned in your opening post maybe 1 thou per month. If that is over the month, rather that 1 thou at a time, you would probably be able to coat the day's run during that day.

With 10 minute cure time, and if you could make rack to hold, say, 20 pieces, even doing them all in one day would be 500 minutes, 8 hours, 20.

With those numbers, I'd think you should give it a try, and step up if you need to.

18 X 18 X 18 means you can do the thing you call " a bit larger".

Cheers,

George There is no way you would want to run a thousand parts a month using an old household oven.
And the capital expense of setting up a decent sized powder coat oven and spray booth is probably between ten and twenty grand, minimum, for a 4'x4'x4' size.
You dont say what your parts are worth, or what prices you would be quoted by powdercoating houses, but I cant imagine you are actually getting paid enough to set up a powder system.

I used to drive 2 hour round trip all the time to the powder coaters- just pay a ten dollar an hour part time employee to do that- or dont you have teenagers in the UK?

I sent similar sized parts out to a shop that had probably invested at least a quarter million dollars in their powder coating setup, not including building and forklifts and pallet racks. So they had an automated overhead conveyor system, where the parts were hung on hooks, or for small parts, sub racks, and run thru a 5 step prepaint dip tank sequence, and then past 4 automated guns, and then thru a 40 foot or so infrared tunnel oven.
Their per part price, as I recall, was around a buck a piece for a pretty fancy color, less for matte black.

If you need the level of quality and toughness of powder, it makes sense to pay somebody like this.

If you can get away with dipping in enamel, then that should be cheaper to set up, and pretty easy to do. I would still consider an oven, though. I have used a variety of industrial paint shops over the years, and one common setup for batch painting of parts like that is a steel cart, maybe 2 feet wide, 6 feet long, and 4 or 5 feet tall, that has bars for hanging parts from, and that rolls right into an appropriate sized oven. You load the cart, spray the parts with either powder or wet paint, and roll the whole thing in to bake.

Just saw George's post- and, well, powder coating in quantity to commercially acceptable standards is a bit more complicated than that. I have probably sent several powder coater's kids thru private college, with the amount I have spent on it over the years, doing regular weekly loads to 3 or 4 different powder shops over a 15 year period, when I was doing small production work.
In reality, you need better guns, bigger ovens, with better, more controllable heats. 10 minutes is not realistic for most powder curing- depends on material, part thickness, and type of powder, but 20- 30 minutes is more common. Pretreat usually means sandblasting on hot rolled, you can get away with just chemical treatments of cold rolled, but cleanliness and prep is VERY important, and makes the difference between a saleable end product and rejects.
The paint does stick electrostatically, but it wont go down the alley and thru the door into the parlor- you still need to shoot from all sides. You need to rack the material free hanging, and that takes space- an 18" cube will realistically probably only hold maybe a dozen brackets, max, and with an hour turnaround time from racking, to spraying, to heating, to letting cool, you will be working 5 days a week to do that many parts with a setup that small.
And the stories of recycling powder are theoretical, to say the least- I have been around BIG powder shops since the late 80's, and never seen one that would bother with trying to recycle the stuff that missed- its just too easy to screw up and pollute the good stuff. In general, this is not like spraying from a can- there is a learning curve, and good equipment makes a HUGE difference in quality- I never dealt with anyone commercially who used a spray gun that cost less than $ to $ or so. If you screw up, the stuff is really on there, and usually requires baking in an oven at degrees or so BEFORE sandblasting it off- which means, on one dollar parts, there is 3 bucks of labor before you can reshoot- little stuff seldom gets reshot. One shop I dealt with, right by LAX, got the tube frames for Cobra cars air shipped in from Great Britain, and they powder coated those- and, if they screwed up, they would strip and recoat- but one dollar brackets- nope, you rely on experience to not screw up, cause they get binned if they dont turn out right.
This is a speciality subcontractor thing, not something you just can do in the corner. Unless your time is worth nothing, your volume is tiny, and you are flexible about quality. Gotta stress were not after quality as such, just better than a half arss'ed spray job. Currently it now transpires that the boss has been taking these home and doing them at no cost to the customer. Something i did not know till 5 minutes ago. Hence i don't think im going to get any were on this after all. Shame because im pretty certain our customers end customers would definitely pay more for the quality on these. Equally even a half assed powder job would be a improvement on the batch of brackets i saw today :-( the brackets are part of a far larger kit of bits, hence even a significant cost increase would not add much to the kit cost.

Equally from the comments i am seeing above it sounds like if we could find a powder coater further afield who is set-up with a production line, not just a gun + rack and oven we could well be nearer the prices we need. And a quality beyond our wildest dreams! The parts are all made from either cold rolled plate or pickled and oiled. Will have to explore that further if this comes up again. There's certainly no way we could spend 2-3K on a gun there's just not enough demand in total to justify that. But spending £30 on a courier or so to send a heavy box of bits around the uk is a viable option! A cubic foot of box space would at best guess be at least 6 months supply of brackets! Ries,

The OP said up to a thou per month. That is less than 50 per day, unless they do a thou at one time per month.

Cool down time would not be a factor if they fabbed 3or 4 or more racks, and I don't know how many they could hang and do at one batch.

My point was, for 600 USD, if they have the equiv. of HF or Princess Auto, as I think they are known in Canada, they would not be spending much at all.

IF the part is acceptable with rattle can black paint, it should certainly be acceptable with home done powder coat. As to the Wiki, and the thin coating to tend to crinkle, some mfgs. like it, as it hides flaws in the finish of the material under it.

Cleaning, and the OP says it is cold rolled, could be done in large batches in a tumbler, cleans off any scale and oils.

I am not up on powder coat, so do and did not know it is directional, but I imagine there would be room between the pieces to direct the flow at all aspects of the parts.

I am not trying to put the powder coaters out of business, but he said, in his OP, that "There price is currently about triple what our costs are to make - paint them ourselves. Our customer would not accept that kinda increase."

"Racking and unracking them is not a issue labour wise. Its a 2 hour round trip to the nearest powder coaters, even if they would show some interest! Hence there's a lot of time lost regardless of them not wanting to do them (there all set up for lower qtys - larger items)."

"Currently it now transpires that the boss has been taking these home and doing them at no cost to the customer. Something i did not know till 5 minutes ago." Hell, if that's the way he feels about it, forget all about it. It is no skin off HIS nose, it shouldn't bother you.

Cheers,

George I wonder how many people who posted above have actually done any powder coating, because some of the things said have been just plain crap.

I bought an inexpensive PC kit from Eastwood and have been using it for the past couple of years to coat ad hoc parts for myself. The finish I achieve is excellent and the powders I use have a bake time of around 10-15 mins. I will normally PC as a first preference and paint only when I can't fit the parts in my oven. Any talk about having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a dedicated PC line for your application is absurd. Virtually anyone on this forum would be, as a machinist, capable of fabricating an oven capable of maintaining the curing temperatures used by the powders and you could do batches of your brackets. Alternatively ovens that were used for other applications in a "past life" could be bought second-hand and used (eg commercial catering ovens etc). You've indicated that the finish doesn't need to be perfect, and the fact you're currently using rattle-cans testifies to that, so an "Eastwood quality" gun would be just fine. You will need to construct a basic booth to spray the powder (BTW yes the excess CAN be recovered if you begin with a clean area, but I don't ever bother, the powder is not THAT expensive!), a way to hang the parts and get to all the sides for even coating (these little guns don't like coating behind areas, nor getting deep into shielded areas if your bracket design involves them), and then transfer to the oven. I find the transfer from the coating area to the oven is the trickiest; the parts can't bang together or touch anything. Again, in your application I'd be looking toward ex commercial kitchen equipment that you could use, check out disposal type sales for some ideas. Ideally you'd want to clean and hang your parts on a rack, coat them, then wheel the rack straight into an oven. I don't think it would take a rocket scientist to design some sort of system where that was possible! I find the oven is normally the limitation in powder coating, if you can figure something out there, the rest is pretty easy. You will need the parts to be properly clean before coating. Of course this is no different to painting, but you can typically get away with a lot more with traditional paint than you can with powder coat. You can't PC parts that aren't properly clean and have any sort of expectation of an acceptable finish. You don't want to have to strip powder coat and redo it!!!!

Have a look at eastwood.com for the powder coating kits, I think for the application you mentioned they would be perfect. Eastwood ship to Australia so I'm sure they would ship to the UK too. You will need to find a source of powder locally, however in my experience that's not too difficult, especially if you don't mind buying larger quantities and storing it. At the small batch sizes you're doing you will be able to turn the air on the gun right down, as unlike a commercial powder coater speed is not as important, and even with a relatively low voltage gun you don't waste all that much powder so it goes quite a long way.

Hopefully that's of some help.

Pete All of my "crap" comments clearly state I am talking about Commercial quantities.

And I stand by em.

Eastwood products are fine for a home shop. A thousand parts a month is not home shop.

I have not sprayed powder myself. But from about thru , I probably sent 2 to 3 truckloads a month to the powdercoaters. I powdercoated thousands and thousands of parts- well over a thousand chairs, alone, in that time. A couple thousand soapdishes, similar in size to these brackets, and projects where each piece was 20 feet long. I still send out some powdercoating, although much less. I have worked with some of the biggest powdercoaters on the west coast. I do have just a bit of experience in this subject. I have seen a lot of possible things go wrong, even from very experienced shops, mostly to do with inadequate prep. The better shops I worked with sandblasted everything, just as a matter of course, because it was cheaper for them to have every part right than to rework even a few. When you are doing it for money, different standards apply.

And I still say, for reliable, repeatable, commercial quantities, you need a good gun, experience, a bigger oven than a recycled kitchen oven, and dip tanks for cleaning.

I did not say the OP needed a quarter million dollar automated line- I said it would be cheaper to send his parts to somebody who has one. I've no doubt that huge amounts of $ can be thrown at powder coating, that's true of many things, what do they get for Rolex's or Ferrari's? but....

In the pic below, the frame was rattle canned primed and painted black, while the octagonal green thing was powder coated. The frame has nicks all over but the green thing, where all the action is, has no hint of nicks anywhere. My conclusion: This is good powder coating.

I built it in a friends shop in Mesa Arizona and when finished, (frame already rattle canned) he asked if I'd like it powder coated. I really didn't care, it's like an engine stand but said OK.

I wish I could remember where he got the spray gun, attending electricals and powder, it was a well known auto DIY equipment supplier, (something with "wood" in it?) and I've no doubt that the gun cost closer to $100 than $2,500.

The oven is a rectangular wooden box about the size inside of a large refrigerator, front door like a refrigerator, same construction as box, with door hinges. There is board insulation between the wood and the "fire".

The "fire" is a kitchen range oven, (might be a range top?) electric element lying in the bottom.

I'd be surprised if John has $100 in it, including the repurposed range timer. He has little sockets on the wall that hold 1/2" EMT, (light electrical tubing) at any chosen interval. Lotsa' little parts, less big ones. Cheap rebar tie wire fits between the EMT and part.

For the stated purposes of the OP, I can't imagine that throwing additional $ at it would make it more suitable. If I'm wrong and your last name is Boeing or Ford, do the high-roller thing if it blows your dress up. My friend John doesn't get their taxpayer provided subsidies but he does do good powder coating. He does work for ASU, Aeromotive lab, Mesa AZ and the prof's like shiney/pretty/durable.

Bob
Private note: John if you see this, please PM me, thank you.
A paint dip is as yet a unexplored option. For these it may well still be acceptable quality wise. Problem is the previous supplier of these and the rest of the parts we make for this customer use to dip everything. That was not good enough on a lot of the other parts. Hence the real idea behind exploring the powder coat option is that it would be darn near a unlimited venture, ie a lot of potential growth - keeping a lot more in house. Dipping would not be. The brackets are all low tolerance simple bends - punches out of 1mm mild steel. They are all under a 2" cube sized part when finished ready for painting, Equally they all have 3/16" or bigger holes that would lend them to hanging.

Pretreatment especially degreasing is and will probably remain the biggest hang up and why this idea will probably never turn into reality. The larger items we would also like to coat in house in the future are manderal bent and punched tubes. They use a particularly gloopy oil to lube the manderal (done by some one else, we have zero control there customer supplied). Hence degreasing it is probably not going to happen in something water based even at temperature. A solvent tank large enough with surficant capacity just is not a option - too costly to fill and dispose off for our limited use. A solvent tank sized just for the brackets would be manageable though. That said im pretty certain they could be cleaned using a detergent of some kind, there really not badly oily!

As to a oven i already have a lead on a little bench top model. Can easily hang 30+ brackets a time and with a couple of racks could swap and get some good production going. Once proven making a bigger oven and going after the other parts or just adding a second little oven for the brackets is not a issue. Anyone looking to make a oven may want to look into fan oven elements and the matching fans to go with them. There darn cheep and a very scalable option. Its definitely the way i would be going for a larger oven if i was to make one. Professional powder coating ovens seam to be ridiculously over priced to say the least!

As to powder being messy i have a fair idea my other lines of work often involve contact with toner from industrial sized digital laser printers. I am assuming powder coating is going to be on a similar level!

Has anyone any experience with fluidised bed coating? Seams a viable alternative to electrostatic spray for parts like this?