Hello all,
During yesterdays committee meeting it was decided to do a special meeting to decide the fate of the powder coating oven. The meeting is set for 8-21-21 at 3pm in the North Lobby Classroom. It has been posted on the calendar, but may take time to appear.
The Agenda for this meeting is for the Committee to decide collectively on what will happen of the powder coating oven.
3 major decisions.
Does the metal shop retain the oven.
Do we repair the current oven.
Do we replace the oven with a new oven.
We have been told there was a corporate donation of a 1000$ towards a new oven. One thing to keep in mind is if we get a new oven, we will need to think about potential disposal costs.
If you have any input on a new oven, including potential selection to buy, post it here or bring it to the meeting. Preferably post it here so we can review it accordingly.
Let’s keep it civil, we all have the same input & the same 1 vote.
Who will do the rebuild and what is the cost and timeline? If you’re looking at another DMS 3 year group project then my take on it (I don’t vote) would be to get a new one. Does it really have to be that large?
That’s my concern; the oven went offline in April and we’re just now getting to this point on even making a decision. However disposal logistics of the current unit would have to be taken into consideration as well.
We talked about that at the meeting a bit; based on prior teaching experience and helping people with their powder projects, I think a 3x3x2’ minimum covers most every base. However, to keep the same internal volume we’re looking at a unit that’s actually a bit smaller overall. Whilst I did help a couple people do bumpers (and my own roll bars), it’s the edge case to what goes into that oven from what I’ve seen members do with it.
I know size wise I have powder coated items that were almost six foot and A good portion of the items that I build and want a powder coat tend to be on the larger side.
Bumpers, rocksliders, table bases and legs, ect, so I would like to see the current oven repaired or replaced with one very close to the same size.
As for disposal if it is decided to replace it, I know someone that will come in, dismantle it and take it away.
One item I did forget, I was regularly asked by members taking my class how they could support bike frames and the like. With our oven one has to load the item into it, whereas a typical powder coating oven of this size you roll everything into it.
The replacements scouted are all roll-in and would make these tasks easier.
I know that I have larger items, like a rear end and axles, and other car parts and free-standing metal sculptures that I would appreciate having the larger space with which to do powder coated finishes. And the roll in rack idea would be awesome and efficient. Seems like it would be really easy and quick for us to use our own resources to fab that roll-in rack; and yes, I’m volunteering, if that winds up being a viable way to go for the space.
Eastwood offers a mid-sized powder coating oven with roll in rack. Not sure how it would compare price and feature wise to some of the other options but it is what I was looking at possibly for my home workshop. They also offer a powder coating booth. Just an idea to consider…
Bringing this back to the front. WE want your opinion. WE want you to have a say so in what happens with the powder coating oven. I’d like to see more peoples input, especially if it comes to a new machine. I know there is more out there on the market as far as ovens go. I know @hon1nbo brought one up in the meeting.
Hi all – I joined DMS months ago specifically to learn powder coating as part of a new hobby, so the oven being out of commission has been a bit of a bummer. The objects I was interested in powder coating did not require such a large oven; however, having the option of roll-in oven would be cool. I did like the turn style in the current oven for hanging items.
It’d be great to keep powder coating as a capability. I’d never used the existing setup outside of coating a DMS keychain for the class, but I’ve always wanted to.
Regarding size, I think at least big enough to do a wheel would be the minimum for anything that I would do, and a roll-in rack for coating something like a tube bumper or a set of four wheels or a bike frame etc, would be pretty sweet.
Ease-of-use should be a consideration. I forgot how to use the oven and wouldn’t have been comfortable doing it solo almost immediately after taking the class. It wasn’t very intuitive.
Cost-wise, if we decided to replace or remove the current oven we need to factor in the cost of moving and disposal. I think it was fairly costly to get it into its current position.
It was about $500 to move in, but apparently this is on the table:
The turnstile that @JayJohnson600 made for it is nice for doing a batch of smaller objects; even if we switched to a more traditional powder coating oven we could make a stand to continue using it.
I know I’m repeating myself here, but when it comes to size of replacement (if we go down that path), I would think that we would like to keep the same capacity and ability instead of reducing it.
Personally, I like the 4X4X6 from Eastwood that @Shawn_Christian posted.
I’ve been looking at the rack from Eastwood as well and with it basically being a “weld it yourself” kit, it could be easily modified to do whatever we need including possibly even adding a few mount/attachment points and turning it into more of a modular system, if that makes sense and I’m getting across what I’m thinking (which I doubt, ).
That also being said, for the price of that rack where we’re just basically buying the pre-cut raw materials to build ourselves, we could probably build our own rack including the modifications for around the same price or a little less.
Their prices seem to have gone up a bit since we started this process, but there are a lot of options and roll in carts still are a thing. They have some that are as deep and tall as ours but are narrower too, which may be nice for getting space back whilst preserving the ability to do frames and some bumpers.
Very little current skin in this, but I would image deep and tall powder coated sheetstock could be fastened into LARGE boxes post heat process. otherwise were just heating massive volumes for no real reason
For a box with non-welded joints maybe, but things like frames, plasma cut yard art, bumpers, batch jobs, etc these are all already large objects that can’t be broken down reasonably.
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