DIY POWDER COATING OVEN WITH A GRILL
We’ve been wanting to DIY powder coat car parts, but who has room for a spare electric oven?
Powder coating looks amazing. Not only is the powder coat process stronger than regular paint, but you can simply restart the process if you mess up by blowing the powder off the part before curing.
The biggest challenge is finding a sizable oven to heat and cure your powder coated parts.
Most folks end up buying a used electric oven. The issue with that approach is you’ll need an extra 220v outlet, more space, and proper ventilation. We have a pretty old gas grill in desperate need of an upgrade. So we got to thinking…instead of junking the grill could we try curing powder coating inside the grill?
The best thing is the grill could continue to sit outside right next to our vapor blasting DIY cabinet in a well ventilated outdoor area.
DIY Powder Coating Oven Setup
We got a Powder Coating System and a portable paint tent from Vevor.
Use code VEVORAFF for a 5% discount.
We also purchased some white and yellow powder. Next we needed to powder coat something for our first test. So why not some 10mm wrenches. We sanded, cleaned, and prepped them. Then we hung them in the portable paint tent on a makeshift tripod and powder coated the wrenches in yellow powder.
Once covered in yellow powder, we mounted an old socket holder to the inside of the grill and hung our wrenches inside the grill. We fired up the gas grill and started to heat our parts. At first the parts got up to 180 degrees. They needed to be as close to 400 degrees, so we cranked up the gas in the DIY powder coating oven and waited.
What happened next was unexpected…
There was an old tray screwed to the bottom of the grill that had some old grease inside and the grease caught fire from the excess heat. Nothing like a good old grease fire ruining what you were powder coat curing.
FIXING THE GAS GRILL
As I started to clean everything up the old gas burners started to fall apart.
So we ripped the gas components out and opted for an electric heat element instead.
The heating element is a 120v 1500w unit which we mounted to the bottom inside of the grill below the grates.
Then we started over. We sand blasted, cleaned, and hung the wrenches in the grill again. The electric heat element was able to get the parts up to about 180 degrees, but heat was leaking from the grill.
The heating element couldn’t make things hotter, so we threw a welding blanket over the grill.
This got the wrenches up to 360 degrees. Since the powder recommendation for curing is around 400 degrees at 20 minutes, we left the parts in the grill for 30 minutes at the lower temp.
To increase temps for the next powder coated part we bought some heat resistant reflective material and lined the inside of the grill.
HOW WELL DOES IT WORK?
Our next powder coating test was going to be a Datsun 510 valve cover. The part is much larger and was the reason we decided to use the larger grill as a powder coating oven. We stripped the valve cover and started the powder coating process.
You can watch the full video below on how the valve cover came out along with more details on how we put the electric grill powder coating curing setup together.
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