What equipment should I use?

[steve_d]

Hi
My business repairs/refurbishes tubular steel car chassis.
What process/equipment would be best for zinc metal spraying these?
Factors to also consider:-
• The chassis will be grit blasted both before and after rust repairs are done.
• We will be doing one about every 4 weeks (unless someone finds out what we are doing and starts throwing work our way).
• We may want to branch out into other coatings. The cars in question have a quite large/prominent exhaust system visible in the engine bay which look rather sad after a few years so a ceramic coating option would be good.
• I need to consider the cost as our usage rate is unlikely to cover the purchase/setup costs so second hand equipment will be required.

Many thanks
Steve
I can provide more detail if required.

[loriolo]

Hi Steve
I can suppose that temperature of exhaust system could be around 500/800 °C, if yes. So I recommend to use a very economic system, like HVOF Wire, that provides a very dense, smooth and fine aluminum or zinc coating with an high bond on a sand blasted surface, you can apply zinc coating on the chassis, or aluminum in cases where there is too much salt on the road or near the see, and for the exhaust system you can use an aluminum coating plus an high temperature inorganic ceramic sealant (from 500/1000 °C) or top coat from Aremco or others, so you could use the color you want, blue, green black white, etc, matched with the color of the car

[Stephen Booth]

HI Steve, Wire Flame Spray (or HVOF Wire if price fits) is good to start with, and will handle basically all metal wires for spraying.

Zinc and Aluminium are the mainstays.

Ceramic Coatings, thats a different system, but suggest you look at Norton Rokide or similar for ceramic Rod spraying

[Pete_F]

Afernoon Steve,
Im assuming that youre the same Steve that ive been talking to on the welding forum re, blasting etc? (i post as 'sasquar' on there)

Its sounding more and more like it might be worth you taking a trip across to sunny dorset to have a (fairly average) cup of tea/coffee with us and have a looksee round what we do. As i mentioned in my message, I run the thermal spray side of the business down here, where we run all of the types of processes that people have suggested, so would be able to show you round all of them, as well as discussing the benfits/downsides of all of them.

In my opinion, i would suggest that either a combustion wire or arc sprayed layer of zinc or ali would be a good staring point for the chassis. HVOF would be prohibitvely expensive and offer little in the way of an advantage from what I can see?

Exhaust wise, theres two 'levels' of coating in my opinion, either a ali coating through combustion wire/arc process, or a magnesium/ytrium zirconia material through a plasma or combustion powder process.

Everything ive mentioned we do regularly on our site in wareham (12 miles from our blast shop) albiet mostly for different industries, and prodominantly robot operated, where presumably you would be looking more towards hand spraying? Give me a call or an email if you want to pop down and say hello and have a look round either the blast or the thermal spray shop, we'll do our best to accomodate you.

Pete
Pete@quaysurface.co.uk
07773405179

[haggis]

Steve, have you ever considered using a bor coat on your steel car chassis? If you're already working with high grade steel I recommend checking out borinox, it's a coat that should be used on stainless and/or high grade steel types. It's a bit different than common coatings but it really is better than most out there.

[max_tucker]

Metal or thermal spraying is a process to protect and greatly extends the life of a wide variety of products in the most hostile environments and in situations where coatings are vital for longevity. It is implemented in a wide range of anti-corrosion and engineering markets including oil and gas, construction, petrochemical and marine.
There are various spraying systems which are described below:
• Flame Spray: It uses gas and oxygen to melt the wires before spraying.
• Arc Spray: It includes direct current (DC) electric power such as batteries to melt the wires.
• Plasma Spray: An electric arc in an inert gas is used to melt the spray powders, ceramics, metals or cermet.
• High Velocity Oxygen Fuel (HVOF): An accelerated oxygen fuel flame is used to soften the spray powders and project onto the substrate with high energy levels of kinetic energy.
All the four systems have different combinations of heat, material delivery and projection method.