Ventures into powder coating

I’ve always wanted to be able to do this myself and with the DSM I had the option of either paying to have it all done ( once and correct ) or do it myself and learn along the way ( with many mistakes to be made )… in true me fashion I decided to do it myself.

I have an air compressor, no powder coating gun, no oven ( that I can use for this little experiment at least )… What does a DIY’er do?… they buy the parts they have to and build the rest! An oven with any decent capacity for powder coating is gonna run you a couple grand at the least. I could have gotten away with just having an extra stove but I really would like to be able to do suspension parts and larger items. I opted to follow some you tube videos and just build an oven with 3x3x4 foot capacity. I was originally going to do something closer to 4x4x6 but I just flat don’t have the room to store something that large in this house.

Looking up prices on steel/galvanized steel for this project resulted in despair, i was looking at some where in the 500 dollar range for just the metal. Luckly I stumbled upon some rando selling 4×10 sheets of “22” g galvanized steel on facebook…. this shit was NOT 22 gauge.

This both worked to my favor and made the job a little harder since it was going to be harder to bend. First things fist… I had to cut up all the pieces into the sheet sizes I needed.

I tried using angle grinders, a masonry saw ( massive failure here ), and ended up just using a skill saw with a metal blade on it to get the job done.

From there i needed to have each piece have 2 sides where there was a 2 inch fold, each piece was 1/2 a wall since each wall would contain 2 inches of fiber glass to keep the 4-500F temperatures contained.

Now it’s time to weld the walls together

Now It’s time to weld the oven into a box

Don’t mind the gap, I fixed that ( the cuts for how i folded the metal weren’t perfect obviously ).

Now lets add some electronics

And heres what the heap looks like from the outside

Parts I used
* Inkbird pid temperature controller
* 40 amp solid state relay
* 12 awg silicone wire
* 12 awg high temp wire
* 240v 30 amp plug ( male )
* 240v extension cable ( 40 foot )
* wheels
* angle brackets from lowes ( feet )
* square tube from lowes ( feet support )
* angle iron for door handle ( will be chopped off after welds soon )
* hangers from harbor frieight welded to the roof
* thermocouple
* ^2 lb roll of welding wire
* ^Lincoln weldpak 140
* ^angle grinder
* 2 GE 240 v heating elements
* big tube of red high temp rtv

anything with ^ in front I already had before starting this project
Total cost: 438 dollars
I managed about a 50% discount and lost a little time but I had fun building it