Industry sector report - finishing

“Our philosophy is, if it’s made of metal, no matter what it is, even magnesium, if it fits in the oven we’ll make the best attempt to powder coat it,” says Dave Valley. “Ninety-nine per cent of the time we do it.”

That’s the attitude of Earl Haggerty and Dave Valley, retired ex-Navy veterans who own Precision Powder Coating in Dartmouth, NS. Haggerty and Valley run their eight-year-old, two-man operation in a 1,000 sq ft rental unit in Burnside Business Park, Atlantic Canada’s largest industrial park with 1,500 businesses. The shop is open five days a week from eight to four and no overtime or weekends. “After all, we’re retired,” says Valley.

As for financial information, Valley comments, “I’ll say $150,000 for last year and that’s about a 40 per cent increase from the year before.” The first powder coaters in the park, Precision Powder’s reputation and business have been steadily growing by word of mouth. “It gets busier every year,” says Haggerty. “It took us five years to get the client base. You give people a good product and they talk you up. You give them a bad product and they talk you down. So far, we’re up.”

Their clients range from individuals to government agencies to large and small businesses, while jobs range from the very small to the very large. Precision Powder has coated everything from metal objects smaller than a dime to triangular metal book corners to egg sorters for a chicken farm to automotive parts to golf carts to helicopter consoles to high-end scientific equipment to 1,500-pound cable reels to an 1,100-pound hydraulic manifold now working at the bottom of a salt mine in Mexico. The adventures of an ice cycler they coated for the Bedford Institute of Oceanography may be indicative of the quality of their work. Designed to sit for two years on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean to gather scientific data, the ice cycler got lost. It had somehow been dragged across the sea floor and thrown down an undersea cliff, where it had imploded because of the pressure; scientists recovered it to retrieve the data and discovered the powder coating was still in good shape. PPC has also powder coated iceberg buoys in florescent orange and the end pieces of canisters or hulls coated white that sit on the magnetic North Pole. Much of what they powder coat for clients such as the Coast Guard and ODIM Brooke Ocean (manufacturers of oceanographic equipment) ends up in harsh environments. Another client is the Discovery Centre, Nova Scotia’s hands-on science centre, which entertains and educates

thousands of kids, so powder coating certain exhibits is

essential. But they also powder coated a three-foot-high metal rose in three colours made by a local artist.

Automotive jobs account for only about five per cent of their work. “We do some pretty high end stuff,” says Valley. “We’re working on a 67 Chevelle and just finished parts for a ‘60s Cheverolet. The neatest thing we did was a manifold and three carburetors for a 1947 Ford truck.”

The learning curve was steep as “reading books will only tell you so much, techniques you have to learn by trial and error.”

Leonard Testas, a sales rep with Tiger DryLac Canada, one of the custom coater’s powder coating suppliers, was generous with his advice. “We’d have a book of questions and we’d say, Leonard, answer these and he’d give us as much help as he could,” says Valley. They learned how to buy powders efficiently, which ones to use and not to use, and which ones they wouldn’t use even though they’d like to because of experiences with the supplier. Tiger DryLac, who will supply in 5-lb lots, is a frequent supplier. So are Rohm and Haas and Dupont, especially since Valley can now order from these companies’ Ontario branches rather than from the US at about a third of the cost. They use two powder spray guns–one from PCF for primer coats and a new Wagner gun that allows for fast colour change—30 to 45 seconds—right on the gun.

“We have a 100 per cent no contamination rate,” says Valley.

Precision uses an iron phosphate pretreatment system with Chemetall Oakite as the pretreatment chemical supplier. The steel is washed “to get the major crud off it,” then degreased and stripped using D-Zolve 298 (a biodegradable product from Solvent Kleene in Massachusetts that will strip paint and powder from both steel and aluminum), then rinsed, phosphated, rinsed again, then submerged in a drying agent (NRP supplied by Chemetall Oakite), and then hung to dry. Aluminum is first rinsed in water to clean it, then washed in a mild sulfuric acid, neutralized in a harsh soap (Purple Power), then rinsed in water, then submerged in a fluoride etching (supplied by Chemetall Oakite), then hung to dry. As their work often ends up in Europe, they switched from Aldine to fluorides for their prep work because of the ROHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) regulations adopted by the European Union in 2006. ROHS restricts the use of certain hazardous materials in electrical and electronic equipment. They made the change when a client, PolyBlend Systems that exports guitar music boxes, had to ask if the powder coatings were ROHS compliant, which they are.

Dalhousie University’s Eco-Efficiency Centre proclaimed Precision Powder an eco-efficiency success story in 2005. “Earl says we didn’t win the award because Dave loves trees, we won the award because Dave is cheap,” says Valley. An initial lack of cash forced them to learn the art of scavenging. For example, desks and tables are secondhand and were free for the asking; the compressor is lined with cardboard coffee trays from Tim Hortons to reduce noise; shelving is reused lumber; hanging hooks are made from coat hangers and reclaimed wire; biodegradable products are used whenever possible. Powder wastage is less than two pounds a week. “Everything’s recycled here, including the employees,” says Haggerty. So is their CSA-approved oven. The 150,000 BTU oven is six ft long by five ft high by three ft wide with a homemade two-ft extension that takes it to eight ft long. Purchased from a friend who got out of the business, “it’s so old there’s no manufacturer’s name on it. But it’s a great little oven and it’ll stay until it dies.”

Valley and Haggerty are considering expansion as they’re bursting at the seams. They want to add another oven, either 10 or 12 ft long, and storage space is a problem. One option is to rent the space next door, put in a hole in the wall and redesign the resulting 2,000 sq ft. The second scenario is to move to another location within the Burnside Business Park that has 3,000 sq ft. Whatever their decision, they have no plans to leave the park which is also home to many of their customers and partly responsible for their growth.CM

Peggy Amirault is a freelance writer based in Halifax, NS.