Originally Posted by TRaffic Jammer
Cycle Therapy....that's my shop near my house I was in there lookin' at Lemonds.
they want to see my light up jacket. you work there?
Indeed I do. I was working part time at the old location, but starting I guess ... tomorrow, I'm full time at the new place. Which Lemond were you eyeing up? I'm a fan of the Poprad disc myself (cyclocross goodness). You should come by and shoot the **** for awhile sometime. All those brand-spankin'-new lounge chairs at the front aren't just there for my lazy ass.
Sr20det,
Here's your nifty tidbit of info for the day:
Powder coating is a dry finishing process, using finely ground particles of pigment and resin that are generally electrostatically charged and sprayed onto electrically grounded parts. The charged powder particles adhere to the parts and are held there until melted and fused into a smooth coating in a curing oven. Before coating, the parts to be coated are first pretreated similarly to conventional liquid coated parts. The pretreatment process is normally conducted in series with the coating and curing operations.
There is essentially two common ways of applying powder coating: by electrostatic spray and by fluidized bed powder coating. There are several other processes that have been developed, but they are far less used. These include flame spraying, spraying with a plasma gun, airless hot spray, and coating by electophoretic deposition.
Powdercoating wood wouldn't work because the electrostatic charge wouldn't be able to happen, plus the wood couldn't handle the heat. I think the same two problems apply to carbon as well. From what I know, steel powder coats fine and aluminum also works really well. I read somewhere that it's best not to strip powder coating, as the process can fatigue the metal of your frame. You can, however, use an additive process to build up a fancy layered powdercoated result.
Oh, and you can actually get decals that can withstand the heat of the powder coating process (it's not "insanely" hot ... ~450-400 degrees). That way you could powder coat your frame, apply a decal and clear powder coat over top.
- eyefloater
Edit: got my coherence on.