Polymer coatings, or durable wheel painting

Polymer coatings are used across many fields of human activity. They're applied to various metal surfaces to give products a finished look and keep it for a long time. One area where powder coatings get used is painting car wheels. A car's wheels are constantly exposed to harmful factors, so only the best coating materials are used to paint them.

Powder coating, or painting with polymer materials, stands out for how tough the finish is. How durable the painted finish turns out depends on following the process rules correctly during painting. Painting with polymer paints differs somewhat from ordinary painting with liquid paints.

The first stage of painting is considered to be levelling the wheel's surface and making it uniform. This is achieved through sandblasting the entire surface of the wheel. That procedure calls for special equipment. You could, of course, try to get a similar result with ordinary sanding, but that would take a great deal of time and patience. This is the first reason why wheel painting should be done at a specialised tech centre.

After sandblasting, the wheel needs to be primed, with the entire surface of the wheel primed on both sides. Priming is a mandatory preparation step before the actual polymer painting. It's needed to create favourable conditions for the coating. Without priming the wheel's surface, the polymer coating won't hold on as long as it otherwise could.

The final stages of wheel painting are the actual powder coating itself and applying a layer of lacquer. For the polymer coating to dry fully and bond firmly to the wheel's surface, certain temperature conditions have to be created. The thing is, powder coatings only dry at high temperature (160-200°), and special heat chambers are used for this. This is the second reason why painting wheels in your own garage is unlikely to work out.

The whole wheel-painting process can take up to two days. That doesn't mean the shop's staff are being too slow. Each preparation step takes a certain amount of time, but the end result is a coating that does its job as effectively as possible.