Update by Tim Suddard to the
Elva Mk VI project car
Feb 24, 2021
Sending out parts for powder coating takes some diligence on the restorer’s part. First, you need to make sure the parts that you are sending require no further modification. Unless it is ready to go on the car, do not send it.
Second, unless you want to either be charged extra or have your parts returned, do not send ones caked with grease or undercoating. Only relatively clean metal can be media blasted, and no blaster wants the blasting room as well as the reusable media filled with grease and debris.
We sent our suspension parts plus a few other bits to Blast Masters. We are longtime friends and trust them implicitly with rare and valuable parts like those on our Elva Mk VI sports racer.
Blast Masters recently started a powder coating business to augment their media blasting operation. As expected, their attention to detail and true understanding and love of restoring vintage sports and race cars made them a perfect choice for this work.
Powder coating offers a more durable finish than paint. It also seems to better hide sanding marks and other imperfections.
While we usually choose satin black for chassis parts, we could easily see that other than the hubs, our chassis parts had been originally painted in silver.
While some will argue (quite accurately) that because powder coating hides cracks, race car parts should not be treated to this type of coating. We plan to mostly participate in show and exhibit-type events with this car, so we went ahead and powder coated most of our suspension parts.
Powder-coated surfaces do not tolerate being hot. You could safely powder coat a brake drum destined for street car use as long as you weren’t constantly on mountain roads, but we would never powder coat racing brake parts.
The powder coating process is relatively simple. After carefully documenting the parts that are being sent, the powder coater will media blast them.
From there, as you can see from the pictures, threads and bearing surfaces are carefully covered up with high-temp tape to prevent those areas from getting powder on them.
Once the parts are blasted and hung on a big rack that will go in the oven, they are then sprayed down with a solution to promote adhesion.
A special electrically charged gun is used to coat all the parts with powder, and then they are baked in a nearly 400-degree oven for about 45 minutes. This delivers powder coating's trademark smooth, durable finish.
And as you can see, the parts are now beautiful and ready to install on the car.
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