Powder Coated my ZR1's

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03-11-2009, 10:44 AM

black00ssFL

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Powder Coated my ZR1's

Got a set of ZR1's in bad shape when I bought my Z. Previous owner got them down to the bare aluminum, polished them up, and never upkept them. The brake dust damage was very bad. They've been sitting in the garage waiting for a reason for me to put them on, and just so happens I got an unrepairable flat last week.

I spent ONE day polishing up ONE wheel. Results were good, but not what I was looking for. And, car is my DD and after spending a day on one wheel, I didn't feel like I could keep up with the maitenence of polished wheels. So, I decided to paint them.

I ask a friend what color he thought would look good? (I was leaning towards gunmetal....to many out there that are black) He reminds that he just recently got a powder coating kit and says we should powder coat them.

I knew what powder coating is, but had little knowledge of it. My buddy had little expierence with a few small parts, but had done a lot of research. So, I ordered some powder.

I ended up buying from powderbuythepound.com. I bought 3lbs (a good thing I got so much as you will see) of their charcoal grey metallic, and then 2lbs of a nice/hard clear.

Took two days to powder coat them as we ran into a few problems from our inexpierence and that we only had one small oven. We ran into three problems during the process.

First problem was out gassing. Out gassing is when the trapped oils and debri inside of a poris metal emit gasses when heated. After doing a couple wheels we noticed pits everywhere. After some quick research we discovered it was out gassing, and one of many remidies for it. We had to bake the bare wheel hotter and for a longer time than the curing processing called for. The powder I used needed 10 minutes at 400 degrees. Then, clean the wheel with acetone to get rid of the oils that came to the surface.

Well that worked....but lead us to our next problem. After prepping one wheel for out gassing, we noticed that the pitting was happening while applying the powder in some places. We tried baking anyways, but came out with the same results...pits and pinholes. Researched again and found out we weren't letting the acetone evaporate enough and the vapors were coming through the powder. And, that we needed to bake at 250 degrees to let the acetone evaporate.

Now we got all that settled, and I go and screw things up. As I'm washing off a wheel, I'm not paying attention were the war goes from the hose and a very tiny bit of water gets into the bag of powder. After a little bit it starts clumping in small amounts and isn't coming out of the gun correctly. After all is said and done, we had to head to the next town over at 10:30pm to get a sifter to get the clumps out. It works, and finally, at 11pm, we're doing things right. We pretty much lost almost a whole day.

All in all each wheel got like 5 coats of the charcoal due to the mistakes and slight sanding between coats. And, when it came down to the clear...things went great.

I'm very pround of the results. And, probably what everyone clicked on this thread for, here are some pics. They are not on the car yet. Working today and a half day tomorrow. They will be on Thursday or Friday and I'll update the thread.

Here are some of the wheels getting prepped. Notice how bad the pitting was. The wheels were prepped with chemicals and a nylon bruch before using a grinding wheel.