Not Ranked
Powder coating is a good choice BUT you have to find a coater that knows what he is doing. The metal must be correctly prepared and the coating must be the right one. There are two types of coating...thermoplastic and thermoset. I can't remember but one is more flexible than the other...you want the flexible one. Most of the top hotrod and muscle car builders prefer powder coating for their chassis etc. One thing is to ask the coater about the process for coating aluminium. It must be cooked at high temp before coating to burn out the oxides and impurities to prevent oxidization later. You can see this lack of pre-treatment on flyscreen doors and security grills that have turned flakey and have a furry white mess on them. This is a good sign that the coater didn't know the process or was too tight to do it right. I had a floor jack coated and a week after I took it to be coated (nicely bead blasted and shiny clean) I went back to take more bits to be done. The jack was just where I left it and rusty. When I collected the finished product it looked 'Fat' The coating was too thick. It chipped on the sharper edges but all scrapes and dings on the flatter surfaces hold up pretty well. I couldn't find another coater that knew the correct process or had the right type of thermoset/plastic coating so I painted my chassis with two pack eurathane paint. It seems ok but will scratch with some force.( ie- fitting tight headers. Chips aren't too much of a worry though. The stones off the front wheel against the front of the side pipe would be a real test of toughness though.
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