Finished the powder coating oven!!

[Chuck_C]

Well, we finally finished building our powder caoting oven at work earlier this week, works fantastic!! Attached are some (bad) cellphone pics of a coated bed rail and cleat. My plan is to do all my bedrails and cleats, then move on to my rims. My color of choice hasn't come in yet(solar flat black) so the rest of my parts will be slightly different, but still black!

[westexasrepublic]

lucky you. Love me some powder coat. expecially black, Looks very nice. Make sure and post up pics of your wheels once they are done.

[IslandNismo]

Send you PM

[PimpinBlkFrontier]

post some pics of your oven too... a powder coating oven has been a project in my head for sometime now... just want to see how you designed yours

[timbo13]

nice job!

I like the black utilitrack - I've thought of doing that myself. Of course, I would have to pay someone to do it .

[Mylt1]

buy an old oven that still works and you can do small items yourself. you just cant ever cook in it again.

[Chuck_C]

We thought briefly about a used home oven, but it was gonna be way too small for some our stuff. Attached some pics of our oven. 36x36x36 interior size, 2 inches of insulation all the way around, 4100 watts of heating elements. Was pretty easy to build, cost was around $1500 total, parts and labor. That may seem high, but we tracked our time building it and figured what our actual shop cost would have been if we had been building it for a customer.

We still have to clean up the wiring, provide some more cooling for the electronics in the control box and find a fan than can take the heat, the one you see inside the oven lasted about 10 seconds at 400 deg

[808Chaney]

Tray to find a fan from an old convection oven. Hell, I can't imagine it would cost that much to buy one new. Nice oven!

[timbo13]

that's a sweet oven! $1500 is cheap, too, for the capability you've got there.

x2 on the convection oven fan, unless you can get some kind of exhaust fan from a high temp process like a reflow solder oven.

I assume the big round hole in the back of the control box is for a cooling fan? that should keep your controls cool.

[Chuck_C]

Yes, the big hole is for a big fan. The heatsink on the relay controlling the elements gets up to about 200deg with the cover on and 165 with the cover off, so we figured some extra cooling wouldn't hurt one bit. The circulation fan inside the oven isnt essential, but it does help eliminate cold spots by moving the air around. We're also thinking about adding a thrid element along the back wall, it takes forever to heat up right now, like 45-60 minutes.