With being in the automotive world one thing is for certain… Cars rust. Some rust more quickly, some rust slowly, but all in all you always have components on your car that are made up of some sort of steel that rusts and gives up over a certain period of time. Now some pieces can become too far gone and you end up having to replace the part all together. However, if you see something start to rot away, you can take the proper precautions I took in this article to keep your vehicles components looking good for your whole life time.
I own a 2003 Chevrolet Silverado. A lot of the truck has rust/rot. I’ve been slowly working to try and reduce the amount of rot as much as possible so that way this truck never gets sent to “car heaven”. One piece of the truck that needed some attention was the battery tray. I had a couple of options of what I could do with it and had decided to clean and powder coat it so that way I never have to worry about having it rust out on me. Sure you can go buy a new one, but i’m cheap.
The first thing I did was I bead blasted the tray. You can do this by getting a bench-top blasting cabinet from Eastwood. I used silicon carbide to clean it, and it only took me about 10 minutes to fully strip the part of rust and grime.
Once blasted I then cleaned the tray with Eastwood’s low VOC pre. After it was all wiped down I was now able to get to powder coating.
I set up the part on an Eastwood powder stand, got out the dual voltage powder gun, filled it with semi gloss black, and got to laying down some powder. I decided to connect the ground right to the part itself to make sure I got the best possible coverage. Once the tray was all covered I then took the part to the oven which I had previously set to 450 degrees.
When I had noticed that the powder flowed out, I was then able to set the oven to 400 degrees and let it cure.
After the part was finally done curing for 20 minutes, I turned off the oven and let it cool. When it had finally cooled down so I could touch it I was able to take the battery tray off of the ovens rack and I was good to go!
Wanna learn more about powder coating? Look below!