CAN YOU USE A GRILL TO CURE POWDER COAT?
We’ve been wanting to powder coat car parts, but who has room for a spare electric oven?
Powder coating is pretty cool. Not only is the powder coat process stronger than regular paint, but you can simply restart the process if you mess up by blowing the powder off the part before curing. However, the biggest challenge is finding a sizable oven to heat and cure your powder coated parts. Most folks end up buying a used electric oven from a resale shop. The issue with that approach is you’ll need an extra 220v outlet, more space, and proper ventilation.
We have a pretty old gas grill in desperate need of an upgrade. So we got to thinking… instead of junking the grill could we try curing powder coating inside the grill instead. The best thing is the grill it would continue to sit outside right next to our vapor blasting DIY cabinet in a well ventilated outdoor area.
DIY Powder Coating Grill Setup
So we got a Powder Coating System and a portable paint tent from Vevor (use code VEVORAFF for a 5% discount). Then we purchased some white and yellow powder.
We found some 10mm wrenches, sanded em, and cleaned them up. We hung them in the portable paint tent on a makeshift tripod and powder coated them yellow. Once covered in yellow powder, we mounted an old socket holder to the inside of the grill and hung our wrenches inside the grill. We fired up the gas grill and started to heat our parts.
At first the parts got to around 180 degrees, but we needed them as close to 400 degrees, so I cranked the grill way above any setting I normally used and waited… Well, what happened next was very unexpected… There was an old tray screwed to the bottom of the grill that had some old grease inside and the grease caught fire from the excess heat. Nothing like a good old grease fire ruining what you were powder coat curing. The wrenches came out burnt yellow.
As I started to clean everything up the gas burners were so old they started to fall apart. We decided to rip all the gas components out and opted for an electric heat element instead. The heating element is a 120v 1500w unit which we mounted to the bottom inside of the grill below the grates.
Then we sand blasted, then cleaned the wrenches, and started over. The electric heat element was able to get the parts up to about 180 degrees, but lots of heat was leaking from the grill. The heating element couldn’t get things hotter, so as a thermal test I threw a welding blanket over the grill. This got the wrenches up to about 360 degrees, so we left the parts in the grill for about 30 minutes and that cured the powder pretty well.
We wanted the parts to get a bit hotter, as the recommendation for powder coat curing is a temperature of typically 400 degrees at 20 minutes. So we bought some heat resistant reflective material and lined the entire inside of the grill.
Our next powder coating test was going to be a Datsun 510 valve cover. The part is much larger and was the whole reason we decided to use something larger like a gas grill. We stripped the part and started the powder coating process. You can watch the full video below on how the valve cover came out with more details on how we put the electric grill powder coating curing setup all together below.
BARBECUE POWDER COATING CAR PARTS IN ACTION
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