Deep "refresh" on my front axle for my 80 series. It's now been sand blasted and powder-coated black. During the process the knuckle balls blued from the oven heat.
Any suggestions for removing the blueing without damaging? I have access to air, power, and hand tools.
Deep "refresh" on my front axle for my 80 series. It's now been sand blasted and powder-coated black. During the process the knuckle balls blued from the oven heat.
Any suggestions for removing the blueing without damaging? I have access to air, power, and hand tools.
This is one of the reasons I will not do powder coating.
You have changed the tempering of the steel of your axle housing.
Holding steel at 401°F+ for an extended period of time can achieve this blue color, but typically steel turns this shade of blue at 550°F.
You may want to contact your powder coating specialist and ask how they washed it prior to coating it, because depending on the type of wash (alkali), this could have been what changed the color and not the heat.
Depending on how it was cooled (in this case air cooled) will affect how much tempering has taken place, if any.
Another of the problems with powder coating is that it is a plastic coating that is heat bonded to the surface. Any scratches or holidays that occur allow an area to oxidize (rust) and that will break the bond. As the corrosion continues, you cannot just paint touch up over the area, as you always leave a gap between the coating and the substrate. Paint will not seal that, so the plastic will continue to peel.
I work with industrial equipment and we have tried powder coating in many different environments and it always comes back to epoxies and polyurethane liquid coatings as being the best performance overall. There's a reason car manufacturers don't powder coat the entire car bodies or the drive line components.
before assembling the axle make dang sure all the sand is removed from inside the axle. even if it was all masked up, I've seen waaay too many cases where sand was hiding and wrecked the diffs/crank/etc.
For these kinds of jobs I use a cleaning company that uses high amperage electrolysis in a hot lye bath. The parts come out looking just like that, but they were never heated over 205 degrees and there is no grit left inside.
I would by surprised to find the PC oven temp was hot enough to do that. Cleaning companies use ovens at around 600 degrees to bulk strip powdercoat from things like the racks used to hang parts during PC.
