dfreder371

Overnight, I got several pms about this, so I figure I may as well make an open post about this powder coating technology. First, some background to establish some creditability.

I have been powder coating for 14 years for ITW in a R&D capacity, and my focus is in materials research. It is my job to pick the proper coating for the task at hand, and the choices are many! If corrosion resistance ONLY is required, we usually specify a powder coating that is an epoxy, but we know that epoxy will chalk and fade in sunlight. A typical application for an epoxy powder coating would be for objects that go on an industrial roof, where appearance requirements are not high, but corrosion performance is.

For wheels, the requirements are many. High gloss (in most cases), sunlight (UV) resistant, abrasion resistance, chip resistant (due to mounting of the tires), no or little orange peel, high DOI (distinctness of image), and in this case, reflectivity, or a chrome coating. That, my friends, is a lot!

In my powder coating encounters, I have acquired three U.S. Patents, and have two more pending in D.C. as we speak. My 03 CLS6 has this coating on my wheels since Easter of this year, and I am very pleased with them. I did not powder coat my own wheels for two reasons. One, these coatings are proprietary, which means I can't get my hands on them. And two: even if I could, there is a step involved where I do not have the necessary application equipment.

What you have here is an environmentally friendly (NO solvents involved here), and very tough wheel coating. Essentially, what happens is the entire wheel (with a certain exclusion) is encased with about .008" to .010" of very tough and corrosion free plastic. PLASTIC! UUUGH! THAT CHEAP SHIT? Well, think again.

Plastic does not rust, period. Plastic is very chemical resistant. Think about that plastic car battery under your hood, holding about a quart or two of SULFURIC ACID. Plastic can be made to be very hard also. The impact resistance of the coating to be described is 160 inch pounds, which is plenty. What this means is that if you take a smooth .5" ball bearing and back it with four pounds of weight, dropped from 40", the ball will dent the plate (severely), but the coating will stretch, and not break.

Now, remember, I said 160 inch pounds is plenty. In fact, in the paint industry, we talk in steps of 40, 80, 120 and 160 inch pounds and we stop there. For a specialized application (my famous Ohio trips), we have developed a powder coating that will handle 850 inch pounds to be applied to cast iron food mixers that are famous for their mechanical durability, so the paint better be good too! I have personally seen a 250 pound guy whack these powder coated food mixers with a two pound ball peen hammer with all his might. It leaves a small depression in the coating, but that is it! OK, on to wheels.

This is done at www.goodrichtechnology.com a custom powder coating house. Put away any notion right now that you are going to print this thread and take it down to the powder coater down the street. They will not be able to do it, special and expensive ($500,000) equipment is involved. Goodrich is at 925.432.7782. Gary (the owner) or Patrick will answer your call or questions. If you visit the link above, Patrick is the guy on page the first, and Pat personally powder coated my wheels.

Please note, there are three finishes available (click on the Permastar tag to see all three: hi gloss chrome, satin chrome, and black pearl chrome). To see black pearl chrome on 03 CLS wheels, look up the thread "Dfreder370 new 03 CLS" posted by smitty, now on the last page or maybe archived by now.

This process beats the snot out of real chrome. It will not pit, chip or flake like chrome will, sooner or later. And by the way, to do real chrome RIGHT, it takes a base plating of copper, six to eight INDIVIDUAL platings of nickle, and then, a top layer of chrome. And even then, it has to be polished, and on the face only (to save labor costs), and it is a very thin plating, maybe .002" thick.

Now, visit the link above again, and note how the entire wheel comes out of the curing oven with what we call a "Class A" finish on all machined surfaces. It is almost a shame to put tires on these things.

Cost: For me, $400 plus shipping, demount, remount and rebalance. Nicky paid a little more, his wheels were bigger than mine. Gary also knew I was powder coating savvy, so I got a good price. I shudder to think what four, ten step chrome wheels would cost. And knowing what I DO know, if I got my wheels chromed, when I got them back, the first thing I would do to them is put 2 mils or so of clear, acrylic powder coating on them to protect them.

Unfortunately for most of us, Goodrich is in Pittsburg, CA, so shipping cost vs. time is a big issue. From Chicago, I sent stock wheels UPS ground, and 5 days later they got them, and it cost $40. Then, three days to apply the coatings (they have to be heated very sloooooooooooowly). I got impatient, and had them sent back UPS next day air for $376 WITH the company discount, so YEOUCH!

So, if you wanna do this, here is the drill.

1. Remove tires/wheels from car.

2. Remove wheel centers, but DO NOT SEND THEM to goodrich. More about these later.

3. Remove and store tires, strip all old wheel weights and remove all valve stems. You do not have to clean the wheels of dirt, but remove any tar or grease.

4. Take your wheel centers to a machinest and have four 1 mm thick aluminum discs made the same diameter as the wheel centers.

5. Put the aluminum discs (4) in a shipping pouch, tape them to one wheel and ship all the wheels to Gary.

6. While waiting (in my case), take your plastic wheel centers to a pinstrip house, and have the Acura "A" scanned into the computer. Pick a pressure sensitive tape to a color/effect of your liking, and have about 20 emblems made of the "A", full size. The pinstripe house will have this material in sheets. I said to get 20 or so, because when you apply these to the 1 mm discs later you will find it hard to get them centered. I got 16 made, and I blew through 15 decals before I had four good wheel centers.

Now, here is what happens to your wheels.

7. IF you wheels need any repairs, here is a good part. Gary also owns a wheel repair business, so he can fix any raspberries you got (but it might cost you extra).

8. The wheels get sandblasted, all over. This is important, and this is where nicky got burned on his first powder coating experience. His first powder coating was applied directly over the old coating, and they weren't compatible. Powder (or any) paint wants to stick to a clean and dry surface that has what we call "tooth" (some surface texture, nooks and crannies for the paint to "lock on" to). Sand blasting does this nicely.

9. Now, the back of the wheel, where the wheel meets the brake rotor gets masked off with a special masking tape that handles the high temperatures involved, 490 F. That 490 F would turn your plastic (and $28 each) wheel centers into puddles. That is what the discs are for.

10. Step one. The wheels and discs are preheated to about 50 degrees above what is called Tg, or, the glass transition temperature of the powder. More simply stated, 50 degrees above the melt point of the powder. Now about 6 to 8 mils (thousandths of an inch) are applied to the wheels. This is THE MOST CRITICAL step in the process. It determines how smooth the final finish comes out, and low orange peel and high DOI is affected here.

11. Step two. The wheels and discs are VERY, VERY SLOWLY heated in an electric batch oven until the powder is cured. This takes several hours and it cannot be hurried.

12. Step three. Here comes the special step that makes the process unique. The now room temperature wheels are put into a vacuum deposition chamber and the atmosphere is sucked out. Electrodes of nickle and chrome are vaporized and are deposited on the wheel and disc surfaces. Finally, only pure chrome electrodes are vaporized and is the final surface that you will "see". Interestingly enough, this metalization coating is only about 15,000 angstroms thick. A hair on your head is about 250,000 angstroms thick, so the coating is very thin indeed. In contrast, the finished 3 step goodrich coating will be about 10 mils thick, about as thick as two sheets of computer paper.

13. Step 4. The room temperature wheels and discs will have about 2 mils of acrylic clear powder coating applied to them and will be fully cured in the batch oven again for about two hours.

14. When the wheels cool, they will be packed and shipped to you, and the packaging job and materials are impressive. I hope you have a large dumpster nearby. Usually, Gary or Patrick will be happy to e-mail you a picture of one of your finished wheels.

Now, go get your wheels and tires mounted and balanced using adhesive backed wheel weights only. I STRONGLY ADVISE you find a mounting house the uses only mounting equipment that is nylon for the bead mounting procedure. Metal to coating contact for balamcing purposes is ok, the wheel centers will cover any marks that might be left there anyway. Preferrably, the lug nuts should be put on and torqued on by hand, but I let them CAREFULLY use an impact wrench on mine, and they sustained no damage. Make SURE that who you use KNOWS that these are freshly coated wheels. Show a lot of concern on your part.

You will undoubtably, by now have handeled your wheel centers, thereby transferring your skin oils to an already really slick surface. Wash your hands thuroughly, better yet, wear plastic gloves. Clean the wheel centers pristinely with alcohol, isopropal, not booze. For an alcohol, booze is considered rather "greasy". I didn't have any IPA, so, I used cologne.

Now, carefully apply your decals, and get them centered with no wrinkles. You will be glad you got spares made.

Go to the hardware store and get some devcon two ton epoxy. You can use the fast setting stuff (5 minute) if you want, but the slower setting stuff (30 or 60 minute) develope better properties over time. I used 30 minute. Mix the stuff up well, apply glue to the plastic wheel center and carefully apply the disc. A thin coating over the entire wheel center is better than a big glob of glue in the middle that squeezes out the sides.

I then waited two hours, then I snapped the wheel centers into the wheels.

Finally, I think you will find Gary and Patrick very easy to work with and as compared to chrome their price is I think very fair and the product is better too. Post a pick of your new wheels for all of us to see, and while your wheels are out, this is a great time to do that deep detailing for the car you promised yourself but have been putting off. I would apologize for the lenght of this, but I wanted to be thurough. I know some of you have two and three piece wheels, I am not qualified to answer coating questions about these, but they should be able to be done with extra masking, which naturally should add some cost. Send thosr questions to gary. Call the phone number, or gary@goodrichtechnology.com

Neither Nicky or myself get anything from goodrich about these posts. We just know a good and fairly priced peoduct when we see it.

Nicky Pass

........what he said!!!!