Things are starting to heat up here. Got a little tease of nice weather so I tried to take advantage of it. Parts everywhere, 10 million things to work on at in parallel, and never enough time.
Saturday I went down to Tech Shop - it's basically a community shop that you pay a membership fee to join, but you get access to all kinds of insane machinery for fabrication. I took a powder coating class and brought some parts down to try out (probably too many, but hey).
I got all my powders from Powder365.com. Seem to be of good quality based on my limited ability to judge.
- Zinc based primer for rustproofing steel parts
- Outgassing forgiveness primer - for use on porous aluminum castings that may have absorbed oil.
- Black magic - exterior / durable black
- High temp black - for use on brake calipers and exhaust stuff if I feel like it.
- AC silver - alternator housing and whatever else I feel like
- Wrinkle black - engine covers
- Starlight clearcoat - clear finish for exterior suspension components, make them more chip resistant.
I didn't get any closeups but this media put a really nice finish on everything - even on the aluminum stuff. No pitting or anything, though I increased the tip angle of the gun to prevent it from "digging in". The texture would probably show through if I were painting it without a primer/surfacer but this stuff doesn't have to be absolutely perfect, just durable. I'm not building a show car.
After washing the parts off, I gave them a prebake to get the moisture out and outgas any contaminants. Once cooled off it was time to put some powder on them.
Then into the oven to bake. Here's some finished parts.
Initially everything looked good but I noticed it was chipping much easier than it should be. I suspect I either didn't give the metal enough time to get up to temperature in the oven (inadequate cure time) or I didn't clean them thoroughly enough. Either way I'll be stripping and recoating most of the parts. I was excited to get some things coated and rushed it a little bit, I think.
Live and learn.
In other news, I also sold my S52/ZF transmission out of my M3 so I started pulling that out of the car on Sunday.
Figured I'd take some pics of the car before tearing it apart. It's gonna be a while before it's back to this state.
Anyway, this is where I ended up at the end of the night.
Probably going to spend the rest of the week getting this pulled and packed up. I have to put it on a pallet / box it up because it's going to Texas.
More to come in short order hopefully.
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