Hey, I wanted to get a powder coater for our workshop and just have a few questions to convince my mentor. Does anyone know if you can use a kiln to heat up powder coated aluminum. I saw it needs to get to 400 F I didn’t know if typical pottery kilns can run that “cold”, our school has one. How does drilling into it after work? Does it cause it to peel at all or mess it up? Any other helpful tips are greatly appreciated! Thanks!
On Team 340 we use a an electric smoker we bought from our local hardware store. We then modified it by insulating the inside of the smoker with more wall insulation and added a chimney to extend the height so we can powder coat all of our longer rails.
All of our rails are fabricated before they get powder coated so that we don’t see any chipping around the holes.
If you have any questions feel free to ask!
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We have drilled and machined after coating without issues, but its only a couple of data points… I have also bent sheet metal -after- coating.
If you use their kiln, make sure to put a pan or something under your parts 
If you have a digital control you should be able to turn down that far. I’ve seen kilns used in low temperature service before. You should watch that your students don’t mess up the pottery cycle settings…
Ok, ya ideally we wouldn’t be drilling post coasting but knowing us we probably will. How much better did the bot look after than before?
Powder coating is always a win, especially if you use orange
One potential advantage of drilling after powder coat is eliminating the hole-shrinking aspect of powder in the holes. And it saves masking 8 billion holes… I haven’t been very happy with slapping a piece of tape over the whole row of holes; the darn stuff tends to shrink and come off during preheat.
Instead of drilling or masking, I would size the holes slightly larger— for us, running a #10 free fit (.201) takes us down to a normal fit (.196) after coating.
Ok, we try and run .201 on our holes so it sounds like we may have to go up a bit size.
We powder coat our robot every year. Drilling is just as easy as bare aluminum.
Holes will need to be re drilled, we use .191 holes for everything and the get tight. A quick drill will open it back up
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Powder coating is beautiful and fun, but it always slows down the build and still gets damage.
We’ve done it a couple times…I have the stuff at home…but never seems worth the effort.
As for using a kiln, I know when we’ve powder coated, the parts are always big or at least long.
I don’t think most kilns are very big.
I have the Eastman powder coating system at home with my former kitchen oven…the longest part that can fit in regularly is 24 inches diagonal inside.
I’ve made a metal box to fit over the opened oven door to nearly double the length, but it’s really hard to keep the heat up to 400 F when using that.
I’d recommend IR powder and an iR heating system for a robot team. Better for big stuff.
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Yeah, I agree that it slows things down… But, color really makes your robot stand out!
If you can powder coat on site then it can be as short as maybe 30 minutes; faster than a rattle can!
I’ve found powder coat to be much tougher than paint, and the crisp “its cool, its done” is handy vs the sorta hard-ish but still sticky fresh paint thing.
I’ve never tried IR reflow; any experience to share? How’s the $$ stack up? I lucked into a big lab oven that can do an entire frame rail…
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The powder coating adds more thickness than spray paint. A team a friend was mentoring had assembled their robot then had trouble with parts fitting properly after powder coating due to the added thickness. This probably won’t make a difference in all instances but may make a difference when there are a lot of coated parts that have to fit in a tight space that cannot be adjusted to accommodate the extra thickness.
If you do powder coat make sure you double and tripple check your robots weight im sure @waialua359 has some insight on this
+1 to this. Powder coating can add a surprising amount of weight, as it’s effectively adding a layer of plastic to every part. Across an entire robot this can add up to multiple pounds.
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This is probably made worse when teams powder coat all parts possible, including parts buried in the chassis that are not visible once the robot is assembled and the bumpers are installed.
Speaking from experience, when we powdercoat our entire robot, its usually less than 2lbs total. Minimal IMO.
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I agree there. I’m still using the 5 (?) pound sack the kids bought three years ago.
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Y’all are using a kiln for PC?
I just have a toaster that nobody has noticed is missing yet.
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Troy, we use a toaster oven, 2 convection ovens, and a large walk-in one for our Team. All of them come in handy. 
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Does the entire team fit in there at once or do you have to do multiple batches?
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Here is what we use: powdercoating.spectrum3847.org