Providing high quality and expert powder coating services across the Midlands and beyond.

That is the first thing to remember, powder coating is exactly that ‘powder’. It is dry and it is applied dry. But before going into any detail about powder coating it is a good idea to understand basic facts about liquid or wet paint.

Paint is a mixture of various compounds and chemicals that are suspended in a ‘wet’ solution usually a solvent but nowadays water based sometimes so that it can be applied by brush, roller, dip, or spray to a surface that needs to be a particular colour.

Going right back to caveman days our ancestors who wanted to record important events on the inside of their dwellings gathered up pigments, berries and roots, and then mixed & ground them into various coloured pastes to produce the first primitive paints.

Paint continued to be made in much the same way until the early 1970’s, a liquid carrier containing a mixture of pigments, resins and other chemical agents usually in a spirit or oil base such as turpentine or linseed oil and later on thinners. It was applied by various means; spray, dip, roller or brush and then either allowed to air dry or force dried in ovens to produce a smooth even coat of colour.

The process of painting industrial goods was quite labour intensive, in order to produce a durable finish that would withstand corrosion it was often necessary to apply 2 or even 3 coats of paint, a first or primer coat was applied and then dried off, then a second and sometimes a third. This was time consuming and polluted to the atmosphere as the thinners (which is derived from oil) in the paint had to be dried and in the process was released into the atmosphere through the drying oven chimneys adding to atmospheric pollution.

Around the 1970’s Paint Chemists developed a process by which they took all of the ingredients of paint; Resins, Pigments etc in dry form and ground them into a powder, after this applying heat and melting the dry powder so it all mixed together and resulted in a brittle toffee like substance being produced that was a homogenous mixture of all the ingredients of paint.

This pre-mix material was then re-ground a second time into a fine powder, each grain of powder being about the thickness of a human hair and containing exactly the same proportions of all the ingredients that made up wet paint except there were no liquids.