The Ceramic Coating Saga

Edwin found a product that is a thermal barrier ceramic coating that does not require baking. The purpose of this coating is to provide high temperature insulation of engine parts. In addition to providing a flat black look, this should help keep heat inside of hot parts and out of areas that need to stay cool.
This summer he ordered his first pint of Cerakote. The instructions say to sandblast the parts before coating them, so he went to a friend’s garage to use his blast cabinet. Come to find out, this friend had just let another person blast off their oil covered parts, leaving the blast media oily and dirty. No bueno, since Cerakote explicitly states to keep the parts 100% free of oil residue. Even a bare hand could leave unwanted oil and possibly harm the coating process. Edwin proceeded forward and blasted the parts anyway and then came home to coat them. He hung them from a tree in the yard and began spraying. It became dusk and the lighting was less than optimal but he wanted to finish. Days later, once the parts dried and we inspected under better lighting, it was revealed that this coating job was subpar. We saw spots where the paint was running, and spots that did not get coated at all. This was a major bummer and set back.
We decided to invest in our own blast cabinet and a 60 gallon air compressor. This compressor needed 220v to run with which the garage, at the home we rent, was not equipped. I came up with the terrible idea to plug it in to the generator which killed the compressor motor, so we thought. After that set back, we took a break from it for a few months to gather ourselves and get a new game plan. We came up with a way to get the adequate power to the garage, for the least amount of investment, and took apart the motor to see if it was truly fried. To our surprise, it looked just fine. We then began troubleshooting this problem. We figured out the start capacitor was blown. That was an easy $10 fix; much better than buying a new $300 motor! Now that we had an operational blast cabinet setup, we could redo the entire sandblasting and coating process.
Edwin sandblasted the parts and we got the “painting booth” set up. We began coating the first part with the Cerakote left over from the summer, but something was not right. It was watery and not coating correctly. We still aren’t sure if extreme temperatures or shelf life led to the degraded paint quality. Regardless, we stopped what we were doing and ordered a new bottle of Cerakote. Edwin had to blast that part, once again, and we waited for the new paint to arrive.
Once it arrived, we finally got to coating; we had a fool proof game plan and knew all the things NOT to do. We were methodical, careful and quadruple checked each part with a few different flashlights before calling the part “done.” Be sure to watch our time lapse of the successful attempt at ceramic coating the parts. We are thrilled to be done with that step of the process!

Thanks for reading our post and check back for future installments of bringing the abomination back to life!