Now that the frame is gone to the powder coaters, it's time to attack cleaning up the remaining suspension pieces before the frame returns. The plan is to complete the disassembly of each of the suspension pieces, replace ball joints, wheel bearings and bushings and either paint or powder coat everything.

     Before I can begin the sandblasting process, first step is to separate the parts into steel and aluminum. Fortunately, I had already bought a sandblasting cabinet from Harbor Freight, so it's now time to fill it up with media and get to work. I decided to do the steel pieces first, so the cabinet was filled with aluminum oxide.as a blasting media. This is good for rust removal and general cleanup. The cabinet worked really well, but I'm really glad I spent the extra time silicon sealing all the bolts and seams as there were no leaks! Also I'm so glad I added the two LED floodlights as the extra light really helps to see what I'm doing. It's time consuming and tedious, but somehow this kind of brainless activity is very relaxing.

    Once I got through several of the steel pieces, it was time to breakout the powder coat gun and see if it's really as easy as the videos claim. I'm using the Eastwood system, gun, oven, pre-treater and powder. The only thing I needed to add was an inline regulator to lower the air pressure to 10-20 psi and an inline desiccant filter to remove any moisture. So I set up a powdering booth with some plastic sheeting over the 12 ton press. I just hang the parts with some bailing wire from the oven rack suspended over the press. The part is washed down with a pre-treater to remove oils and contaminants. It then just air dries, with sometimes a little help from some compressed air.

     I loaded up the gun with some cast aluminum colored powder . It's kind of a silver gray, 80% gloss and looks close to the original cast aluminum parts. The gun has two voltage settings, 15kV and 25kV for small and large parts. These are all small parts so I used the 15kV setting. You just hookup the ground clip to the oven rack and current flows through the bailing wire hangars to the parts. I started with a couple of small emergency brake cable brackets, pointed the gun, pressed the power supply button and pulled the airflow trigger. A small cloud of powder comes out of the gun and the electrostatic attraction deposits the powder on the part. It's awesome! No need to point directly, the static attraction pulls the powder into all the nooks and crannies. No worries about powder thickness, the powder thickness is limited by the voltage.

    Carefully moving the oven rack to the pre-heated oven, it takes just 20 minutes at 400 degrees and the powder coat is complete. When the oven "dings" it's time to take out the parts and let them cool. They really look great! Bright and shiny and very professional. There were a few parts that had threaded portions, so I have some high temp masking tape to cover the threads. The powder coat is just a little too thick to use over threads and machined surfaces. I just repeated the process for the remaining silver pieces, except now I could hang many more parts on the oven rack now that my confidence had improved.

     After finishing all the silver parts, it was time to change the powder in the gun to gloss black. Gun cleanup is really easy, as the powder is not sticky or anything, so just a little compressed air and it blows right off. I started the gloss black with a couple of small sway bar brackets to see if there was any difference from the silver. No difference, and the gloss black looked awesome! Finished up the remaining steel pieces and everything came out great.

     Now that the steel parts are done, it's time to move on to the aluminum pieces. I had to clean out the blasting cabinet, fortunately there's a trapdoor at the bottom and you just put a bucket underneath and the media drops out the bottom. A little compressed air to help it along and and the shop vac for final cleanup. Now I changed over to baking soda for the aluminum parts. It's a lot less abrasive for the softer aluminum and easier to cleanup.

     I tried the first couple of parts, a front spindle and a rear axle shaft and they cleaned up great! I still have to disassemble the rubber bushings from the various aluminum parts, but I have all new polyurethane replacements. The process is to disassemble, soda blast, powder coat, and then install the new bushings. Hopefully I can complete the remaining parts by the time the frame returns.