- Oh, come on, you're stupid.
- This gun kinda sucks.
Like what the (beep)?
- You know you can do it
when you're done powder coating.
- Why? - You can murder some money.
(both laughing)
- You're up.
- Should I pay a pro a bunch of money
to powder coat this valve cover?
Or is it something I can do myself at home?
Should I DIY,
or should I don't?
♪ Do it ♪
♪ Don't do it ♪
- Thanks to carparts.com
for sponsoring today's video.
Everyone struggles with relationships,
in your relationship with your car,
it's no different.
So, Adam, what brings you in here today?
- Well, my Honda here,
I've done nothing but love.
- Hmm.
- Almost got me into an accident,
it's unappreciative,
unappreciative of all the love that I give it.
- That sounds like it might be a toxic relationship.
Honda, what is your perspective?
- He's lying,
we almost got into an accident
because he won't fix me with quality parts.
- Hmm.
- You call that love?
- Love doesn't have a single definition.
- Yeah, do you feel that?
Do you smell that?
That exhaust,
that's negative energy coming out
but I think I know the perfect way
to make it simple.
Adam, have you considered going to carparts.com?
carparts.com is a smarter way
to shop for auto parts connecting you
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Plus carparts.com
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- Exactly, now it's time for you two to hug it out.
Go on, hug, hug your car.
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Yeah, oh, that's sweet.
- Of course a true pro
can give you a great result every time,
but if you're the DIY type like your boy,
you can always take a crack at doing stuff yourself.
So today, I'm gonna take a crack at powder coating.
What is powder coating you ask?
Well, it's a painting and ceiling process
for metal parts that's very durable
and can withstand a lot of heat.
So, brake calipers, wheels, things like that,
that are made outta metal and need to be durable
are great candidates for being powder coated.
Powder coating requires that you bake the powder
to give it its gloss
and ultimately the protection it's known for.
And that means your parts need to go into an oven.
So, there's an oven in the garage.
(upbeat music)
But there's more to this than just an oven,
so let's take a look at all the stuff that I got.
Okay, here's what I've got
from the old Harbor Freight,
a total powder coating gun set up,
got some powder,
valve cover from the Miata.
This is polyester masking tape,
got some acetone, sandpaper,
some Brio pads, some brushes,
some stuff you might already have laying around.
I also spent $200 on an oven.
So all in all, I've spent about $350.
Now, let's go to the pro shop,
see his setup,
and find out what he would charge me
to do the same job.
We're out here at Moreno Valley
at Velocity Powder Coating.
I've got my K-series valve cover
and I got Chris here, Chris.
- How's it going?
- Not too bad.
Thanks for having us. - Good to have you here.
- I understand you'll be powder coating
this valve cover for us.
- We are. - Showing us
how a pro does it.
- Yes.
- How much would that cost me?
- Something like that would run
about 200,
anything four cylinder around that size range
would be that price. - Sure.
And like you said,
any of these colors pretty much?
- Yes, any of those colors.
- All right, well, that's a nice variety.
200 bucks though I mean,
that's not too bad,
I already spent more than that on the oven,
so that's (beep).
Well, yeah, it's fine.
I'd love for you to walk us through
what you're gonna do with this thing
and teach me some stuff.
- Sounds good,
let's come on back.
The first step would be going into the chemical tank.
It's gonna strip the paint off
and it's gonna get rid of all this grim
and leave you with a fresh valve cover to start with.
One sits out of the strip tank,
it goes into the sink,
we just rinse it off,
probably takes five minutes,
again no elbow grease,
just rinsing it off hose.
The next step after it's rinsed off
is gonna go into the oven,
just dry it up on the inside,
nothing's stripping out of it,
nothing's coming out of the pores behind the baffles.
- Nice.
- And after that, it cools down
and it's ready for the sandblasting cabinet.
- Ah, sandblasting, my favorite part.
- This is our Trinco pressure cabinet.
This is all self-fed.
I don't have to do any manual labor
as far as filling it up,
it kinda just does its own thing.
- Yeah, I like that.
I don't have a blast cabinet of any sort.
- After sandblast final step would be to mask it,
any threads, mating surfaces, anything like that,
it's all gonna get mask.
- Right, right, right.
I have never used a powder coat gun in my life.
- Okay. - So, let's look at your setup
and talk to me about it.
- Yeah. - How does it work?
- This is our Gema Opti Pro powder coating unit.
Something like this retails
at about 9,000.
- Oh boy, well, all right.
What does this do?
That like a cheap Harbor Freight gun
like what I'm probably gonna use.
Doesn't do.
- There's a lot of variables,
just overall consistency of how the powder flows,
how it fluidized the powder out of the box.
- How long would this take you from start to finish?
- A valve cover,
start to finish would probably take
about maybe three to four hours.
- I'll let you get to powder coating our valve cover.
- Sounds good.
- All right, so let's go over,
how this is gonna go in terms of cost.
First off, way cheaper than I expected.
Chris is only gonna $200,
do the valve cover and I've already spent 350,
but the good news is like always,
now we have the tools to do this again.
In terms of effort, I am screwed.
It's just gonna take me way longer
and it is gonna be a lot more effort
than Chris has to put in
with his sand blaster and his dunk tank.
I'm gonna have to do all that by hand.
If I do it inside of eight hours,
the result comes out good,
and the effort isn't too bad,
then I will be ready to call this a win.
And with that start the old timer.
(upbeat music)
Guy just a little degreaser first
and should take care of most of this.
(upbeat music continues)
I wish I had a bigger sink,
maybe a chemical tank.
So, let's check in on time,
we are at just under an hour right now.
Valve cover is sufficiently de grimed,
it's time to sand it.
I'm just gonna give this thing a once over,
all over the bits that we wanna powder coat.
The most important thing here
is to get all the oil
and grit and grime off this thing,
and we did a pretty good job of that
with just the brushes
and the degreaser and the soap,
but sand paper's gonna take this a step further
and give us basically a brand new surface.
(upbeat music)
Okay, we are finally done sanding
and it's been about an hour and a half since we started.
My hands, arms, fingers, numb, dead, tired.
It took Chris like five minutes with a sand blaster,
and that was fun.
This wasn't very fun,
I gotta be honest.
So, now we gotta clean this thing up,
and then I got a mask,
and then she's ready.
(liquid splashing)
(brush sousing)
(water splashing)
Our valve cover is clean
and the next step in the process
is gonna be to dry this thing off very well.
And since I have a fancy new oven,
I'm gonna use the oven to dry the valve cover.
Now, you may be thinking
that you have an oven at your house,
so, one of the big expenditures
of powder coating is already taken care of for you,
but that's not really true,
you definitely shouldn't use your parents' oven
to do powder coating.
The powder basically just stays in there forever
and you don't wanna eat that,
so, buy a cheap old oven and use it.
Let's see if this thing works.
(metal clanking)
All right. (beep)
Bake it.
(upbeat music)
Okay, the next step in this process
is gonna be to mask off all the parts
that we don't want to powder coat.
This is polyester tape
and it's built to endure heat
but this is what you wanna use for powder coating,
'cause again, it's gotta go in the oven
and we're gonna make some cones like these
and then these can go in these spots.
(upbeat music)
Well, hot dog.
This thing is pretty much ready to powder coat.
I'm gonna wipe it down one last time
with acetone just to make sure
it's clean as it can be.
But now it's time to set up our powder coating gun
and talk about how it works
and what the heck's going on?
What makes powder coating so cool?
All right, so first off,
we gotta understand that powder coating
is sort of like painting,
but with dry paint.
The paint is the powder.
And then the curing process in the oven
is what kinda melts this paint
and flows it all out
and turns it into a glossy good final finish.
Here we've got our
$70 central machinery powder coding system,
and it's basically an electrified paint gun.
We've got this positively charged wire in here
and it electrifies, it gives a positive charge
to all the powder coming out of the gun.
And this goes to the part that we're powder coating
and it grounds that part.
So, we've got a negative part with positive particles
and they wanna stick to each other
and they cling to it just long enough
to get you to the curing process,
and then once you're cured,
you're good to go.
(powder coating gun hissing)
- Ooh.
Boy, that's a nice powder.
(upbeat music)
All right, that seems like it's probably gotta be enough.
I mean you can tell,
this is a high quality tool,
you can feel it.
I'm gonna throw my mask on
and then we're gonna do a couple test spritzes
and see what the pattern looks like,
we're gonna be looking for a fine even mist.
- 4:20 it is.
- Oh, (beep) on the dot.
Okay, so, we've obviously got the gun with the trigger
and that's what expels the powder,
but there's a foot switch
and that is for initiating the voltage.
So, without pushing the foot switch,
this won't work
but when you push the foot switch,
it electrifies the powder,
makes it stick to the part.
So, let's see if that proves to be true.
(upbeat music)
And so I'm gonna be trying to kind of point this thing
in basically all sorts of different angles
but I wanna make sure that the powder's able to fall
into all the cracks and crevices.
So, just kind of coating it real heavy,
but hitting it from all the different angles.
This gun is like seems to be working pretty well.
(upbeat music)
The foot switch sucks though.
Okay.
(upbeat music continues)
- Okay, it looks pretty good.
It is all red from what I can see,
now that I say that I see one spot
that I can see some bare metal,
so, I'll spray that again
but I've got two spots here,
right here and right here,
where I feel like maybe I went a little bit too heavy,
and so now it's got kind of a almost fish eye effect
but you can see right here,
it's got a little bit of acne going on.
Well, you know what?
The spraying was the easiest part thus far,
so let's blow this off with an airgun and start over.
(upbeat music)
- This is the most satisfying part, yeah.
(upbeat music continues)
Okay, right back to where we started.
We had a little bit of inconsistency
with the spray of the gun,
you might have noticed I was shaking it
to get like heavier spray,
that kinda sucks.
I don't know what to do to avoid it,
but see how she goes.
Let's give this another shot.
(upbeat music)
- The issue right now is that
it's sort of coming out inconsistently.
(upbeat music continues)
This gun kinda sucks,
very not fun to use, so short,
like what the (beep)
(upbeat music)
I think we're gonna call that done.
Okay, so you can see here
at the front at like the cam cover area,
we still have a little bit of that sort of pitting looking,
I think it's just from laying a little bit heavy
and possibly being a little bit too close
to the valve cover.
Let's compare my cheap gun to his super expensive gun.
Mine sucked.
The cords are way too short
and there's too many of 'em.
The foot's switch sucks
and it was super inconsistent.
His gun was doing a lot of tricks,
he did that wheel in no time flat
and I think he could have done it with his eyes closed
and that's definitely his experience and skill
but also those $9,000 tools worked pretty dang good.
I am still interested to see how this comes out
after curing.
So, let's put it in the oven
and see how my job turns out.
$70 gun might do good enough,
we'll see, I don't know.
All right, the part is in the oven finally
and this part is pretty important.
So, we've got the oven at 400 degrees
and basically all that needs to happen here
is the part, the valve cover
or whatever your powder coating needs
to get up to that temperature.
400 degrees, all that powder, as it warms up
is gonna kind of flow together
and melt into one big, nice layer of powder coat.
So, we'll see it go from kind of dull and hazy powder
to hopefully a nice glossy shiny finish
right before our very eyes.
Bright in the sensor.
(upbeat music)
Ooh, she's glossing up,
getting close,
we're 340 degrees
but you can see that looks like some shiny stuff.
All right, no peeking,
no more peeking.
(upbeat music continues)
And she's cooked.
Okay, so, there's a few more things
that are important though,
before we go yanking this out and ogling it,
I turned off the oven,
I've got the door open,
and now I'm just gonna let it kind of slowly cool down
for about, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 minutes,
and then we'll pull it all the way out of the oven.
But I gotta say from here,
it's looking pretty good.
Sure, look shiny.
Okay, Chris is back and he's got his valve cover
that he's completed on a professional level.
Now, let's compare my work to the pro's.
Keep in mind, this is my first time.
How'd this go for you?
- These are another day in life for us,
just pretty straightforward, yeah.
- Yeah, that makes sense,
and honestly, you know what?
Yours looks pristine, perfect, flawless.
Mine looks decent.
- Yeah. - And I'm pretty happy
with how it came out for my first time,
$70 gun. - Yeah.
- And up and running off a generator.
Okay, so you can see in a few areas
I had some poor coverage.
- That's more of a spray issue,
inconsistency with the gun,
your gun having trouble doing
what it's supposed to do. - Yeah.
And as you guys saw
that gun was like shooting a bunch sometimes
and then none other times,
so it was a little bit tricky.
What do you think?
I mean, gimme a grade,
I want a rating,
I want you to grade me and rate me.
- A C, C plus.
(All booing)
- All right, I mean, I was thinking more like B maybe,
but... (both laughing)
All right, now, I'll take C plus.
- [Man] Yeah, give him a (beep) F man!
(All laughing)
- Okay, so, now let's cover a few things.
Let's talk about cost, time, effort
and the result, the outcome.
First off cost, you charged me 200 bucks.
- Yes.
- I spent about 400 bucks.
We're okay with spending a little bit more money
to own the tools.
Good deal there.
Now, in terms of time,
this took me things about five hours
which is a little bit better than I expected,
I was expecting closer to eight,
you with all your tools,
how long do you think it took you start to finish
once you got started here?
- Maybe two, three hours start to finish.
- Okay. - Or something like this.
- And for a very good result.
But I kinda like doing this stuff,
so time's okay with me.
Now effort, like I said,
you've got the chemical tank, the sand blaster.
I was sweating a lot more than you probably did.
So yeah, the effort was higher
but that can be reduced from the future,
so I'm cool with the effort.
Now, let's talk about the outcome.
It was a fun process
and the result was pretty dang good,
so I think moving forward,
I could do even better.
I'm calling this,
you know what?
No offense to you because your job is perfect,
but I won.
(All cheering)
Thank you for all the tips, tricks and pointers
that helped me get this done,
and thank you for doing such a sick job on
the K-series cover.
- Yeah.
- And that yellow is pretty good.
- Yeah, donut yellow.
- Reminds me of something.
Jeremiah could be on a tool.
Go get yourself our new tool shirt
at donutmedia.com.
That's right,
we came out with our all new tools shirt,
it's made out of 100% corn,
so it's the perfect shirt to wear
while you work on your car
or to give to that one friend
who forgets the name of that one tool.
- Maybe it'll help you get that project car up and running
that you've been planning on working on.
- Yeah, the problem is that I can't remember
what pliers are called.
(both laughing)
- This is probably possibly
my favorite shirt we've ever made.
First off, I love the color purple
and it looks sick against this gray,
and it's like a cheat sheet.
If you're in like automotive school,
have the person that sits in front of you wear their shirt
and you'll get everything right on the test.
Donutmedia.com,
get you one today.
Trust me, best shirt ever.
- Hmm, so soft.
- Well, we did it.
I powdered a coat of valve cover
and it doesn't look too terrible,
and of course, Chris did a perfect job.
I learned a new skill this week
and I hope you guys learned some stuff as well.
So, go follow Chris, @velocitypowdercoating,
follow me, @zachjobe,
follow donut, @donutmedia,
but before you do that,
like this video and subscribe to the channel please
and I'll be right here licking my ketchup and mustard.
Hmm, big mustard guy.
Ooh, I love that ketchup.
Hmm, find me a hot dog.