Ouch my eye!

As I prepare to have the chassis stripped of its current paint & rust coating, I’ve been thinking about how I should refinish it. The chassis itself is built like a tank out of heavy gauge welded steel. It needs some sort of protective coating, or it will just rust into nothing. My initial intention was to have it powder-coated, but now I’m having second thoughts.

Powder coating is relatively expensive, and I’m worried about the paint that is currently on the unit. Even after I soda-blast the paint off, there will be areas with original paint left behind. This is because the chassis has several covered pockets and cavities. If the original paint is a powder coat, there should be no issue, but if it was a liquid paint, it may off-gas or release, compromising the powder-coat.

My other option is to spray paint the unit. This will be considerably cheaper, as I can do the work myself, but the finish will not be nearly as durable. The risk of imperfections in the finish is also higher, as there is a long dry time, allowing for anything floating in the air to land on the wet paint leaving a bump. Spray painting also won’t get into all the nooks and crannies as easily as powder-coating does, so I will have to rely on whatever paint is currently there being in good enough shape to protect the steel, in the places I can’t get to.

I’ll have to decide this soon, as the chassis needs to get painted before I can start moving forward with the rest of the project. It is, after all, the platform on which everything else sits.

So if there is anyone out there willing to chime-in and offer some advice or opinions on how to finish, I’m listening.

[Update Nov. 12, 2011] I’m going with powder coating on the large parts, and spray-paint on the smaller internal mechanical parts. After some more research, it appears that powder coating is not all that much more expensive. But due to the potential for loss of the small parts, I’ll spray paint them myself. The small parts don’t require the durable coating of the main chassis, so there is no real need for powder coating on them anyway.[/update]