May, 2026

You’ve seen it before. A beautiful powder coated aluminum window frame or railing looks perfect coming out of the oven. Three months later, it’s sitting on a dock in Florida or near a coastal chemical plant – and tiny blisters start bubbling under the coating. Or worse, red rust creeps out from a drilled hole. I’ve been called into six shops over the last two years with the exact same complaint: “Our salt spray results are all over the place.Read More …

Last September, a batch of powder coated architectural light housings landed back at our dock with a note: “Surface defects – unacceptable.” When we unwrapped the first few parts, my heart sank. The smooth satin black finish I had signed off on was peppered with tiny craters and pinholes, some so deep you could see the raw casting underneath. The entire lot was headed straight for the stripping tank. The culprit wasn’t a dirty booth or a bad batch ofRead More …

If you’ve worked around a powder coating line for more than a week, you’ve seen it: a small, circular depression in an otherwise perfect finish. It looks like someone pressed a tiny ball bearing into the hot film right before it cured. Maybe you’ve called it a crater, a dimple, or a fisheye. Whatever the name, it’s annoying, and it’s almost always a contamination problem that plays hide-and-seek with your line. I remember one winter we chased a fisheye issueRead More …