Our Process

Understand & Plan for the Part

Excellent finishes start with a plan customized for the unique characteristics of each part—the material, geometry, weight, mass, tolerances, and performance demands—to identify the best tooling, masking, coating, curing, and packaging in advance. We take the time to thoroughly understand each part and the performance demands our customers have for it. Because it’s the first step in ensuring excellent results.

Custom Tooling

We build custom tooling for virtually every part we coat. It’s an investment to ensure parts are meticulously masked and precisely oriented during coating. While plenty of powder coaters make do with standard tooling, our results prove that custom tooling is an upfront investment that pays huge dividends in part quality and process efficiency.

Surface Preparation & Pretreatment

Proper preparation is critical to the durability and performance of a finish. While many in our industry take a one-size-fits-all approach (adapting systems designed for ferrous parts to pretreat a wide range of metals), our customers’ performance specs demand more. To properly powder coat metals like aluminum, magnesium, zinc, and more—especially those that must withstand wet, extreme, or corrosive environments—we’ve developed a dedicated pretreatment system that provides unsurpassed adhesion in these challenging applications. Ask us about our pretreatment processes. We’ve made a science out of it.

Powder Application

The flexibility of two completely independent, automated lines sets us apart.

One line is designed specifically for nonferrous metals –aluminum, zinc, and magnesium—as well as for high volume jobs and jobs with extremely stringent tolerances or cosmetic requirements, such as class “A” appearance needs for the automotive, appliance, or recreational vehicle industries. The second line is designed primarily for ferrous metals, but can be deployed for multi-metal processing as needed. This line allows for fast and frequent color changes and is our go-to line for large, heavy parts and larger steel weldments, including parts for Caterpillar’s heavy equipment and Harley-Davidson’s motorcycle frames.

This kind of process flexibility is backed by a workforce that brings decades of experience, formal training, and deep knowledge to our processes. Our coating rooms are some of the cleanest and most technologically advanced in the industry. And we’ve carefully invested in equipment that improves the quality and efficiency of our operations. Our systems, technology, and teams are why companies like Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, and Whirlpool, among others, come to us for highly cosmetic finishes, stringent performance requirements, extremely tight film-thickness tolerances, and more. We consistently work with greater precision, speed, and flexibility than our competitors.

Inspection & Testing

We carefully monitor our processes and track critical data—on every part and every project. Careful, rigorous, and continuous testing is critical to our ability to meet challenging requirements in appearance, performance, and coat thickness—reliably and repeatedly. Beyond visual inspection, we employ film-build measurements, corrosion testing, adhesion testing, and cure testing to validate that our work exactly meets our customers’ standards. We’re happy to provide multiple-point testing data at regular intervals so our customers are assured that we’re consistently meeting parameters that are critical to their products’ success.

Packaging & Shipping

We understand the importance of making sure that products get to our customers on time and in perfect condition and we ensure that the best possible packaging solution and shipping methods are considered during this part of our process. Sometimes it may require mylar packaging or custom-designed packaging; we’ll review your needs and get the results you expect.