Suzuki GT750 - DIY powder coating

I have been spraying my cars and bikes for a number of years in my garage at home mainly in cellulose and 2pk, recently had some of my bike bits powder coated by a local company and was quite surprised how good some of the parts came out as I always assumed powder coating was more of an industrial finish for garden gates and stuff like that and assumed it wouldn't be good enough for my bike. As mentioned most of the parts done by the local powder coater came out pretty good but I did miss the satisfaction of doing it myself, and also liked being able to paint the parts when I liked, rather than waiting a week or so and possibly changing my mind and having to wait another week for it to be re-done in a different colour.

I thought I would see what was involved with powder coating and found a number of web sites advertising DIY powder coating systems, I was a little weary of getting a DIY systems as I wasn't sure how good these would be as the pro's spend thousands of pounds on their setup. But after a while I thought I would give it a go.

Stumbled upon this web site Electrostatic Magic and ended up buying a small powder coating system for £119 + P&P, they also sell the powder in small quantities which is really handy.

Next I needed to get an oven as the curing process of the powder coating is slightly toxic so you can not use the same oven that you will cook your food in.
Found a customers design for an oven on the Electrostatic Magic web site which was big enough to do most of the outstanding bike bits in, the oven measures 60cm x 40cm x 50cm ( LWH ) and with a few slight changes from their design it was ready to use.

The metal cabinet can be purchased from IKEA for £34.99 IKEA Cabinet all you need to do is to cut out some holes in the top for the hot air guns, these vary in size depending on the guns used. Also drilled two clearance holes for M6 bolt in the sides to fit a rail in to hang the work from, it a 600mm long piece of copper water pipe, with a stepped bush at each end to bolt in to.

To heat the oven I tried a couple of hot air guns like you would use for stripping paint off woodwork, the first two were from Silverline which were £12 per gun, unfortunately they only lasted one session, when I switched them off after the 10 min's curing they refused to start up again. Got them replaced a couple of times and the same thing happened each time, I then purchased two Dewalt guns on offer for £22 each from screwfix, the normal price is £34.99 Dewalt Gun these have been used loads of times and work very well. These guns have a fully variable temperature control so with a bit of practice can be turned up to about 3/4 power to quickly heat the oven and backed down to just over half power and will maintain the 180 °C without having to power the guns off and on.

This powder coating system is really simple to use and hopefully as you can see in the photos below you can get a really good finish, and in my opinion it is as good as 2pk without the problems of getting dust on the drying paint ( unless you have a decent spray booth ) and on small items they can be sand blasted and with 30 min's can be powder coated and ready to fit on the bike and it is hard enough to fully tighten up any bolts, larger items take longer to heat up and cool down.

I will also add a small glass window in the door to make it easy to see when the powder starts to melt without having to open the door and letting out the hot air, as the baking process requires 10 min's at 180 °C from when the powder glosses over.

Click the images below for full sized pictures most are around 1200 x 900

I can definitly recommend this system.

Click here to view the other DIY powder coated parts.