www.thefabricator.com: Parts flow from blanking to bending with minimal work-in-process (WIP). It all seems seamless until you walk to your in-line powder coating system. You see WIP everywhere. Parts are hung haphazardly, widely spaced. Even worse, you see someone wielding a Dremel to frantically remove paint from hooks. Evidently, a lack of grounding was creating some adhesion difficulties.
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Powder coating seems almost magical to me because it gives a hard, durable paint coating in a way that almost serves as part of the underlying part. It also is elusive because it requires tools and workflows that are only available at the industrial level, and not available to a hobby fabricator. While I will probably never be running a powder coating line myself, it was interesting to read about the various factors that a manufacturing engineer would need to think about fixturing parts for powder coating. I feel like I normally think of engineering as just the process of figuring out what the final part needs to be, but in this case the process of manufacturing that part is just as important, so that the final coating is of a high quality and will stand up to years of rough use. I am mostly just grateful that somebody has figured this out, so that when my source 4 gets hit on the meat rack, it still has a resilient coating for time to come!
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