ET-9369 1E1950 Black S/G TGIC Polyester is our newest product. This product was developed to meet the lower end specifications where cost is the deciding factor for selecting the product.

Special effect coatings include metallics, dimple/hammer textures, hammertone textures, vein textures and wrinkle finishes. Each of these requires extra training for painters to get the paint to look its best. Below is a breakdown to assist your customers or troubleshoot a problem.

Most of the problems associated with wrinkle finishes are not due to gun differences but film thickness variations, pretreatment rinse problems and overbake/underbake issues. Polyester wrinkle finishes will telegraph phosphate pretreatment lines if not rinsed properly. Make sure the parts do not have rinse lines. No matter what type of gun you use, controlling your film thickness is a must. Wrinkle finishes are best sprayed at 2.0–3.0 mils or at full hide, whichever is greater. Underbaking or overbaking could cause the wrinkle to not form properly. Run a Datapaq on the oven if the wrinkle isn’t forming properly. Polyester wrinkles need to be baked 10’ at 390°F PMT without any spikes to the 420°F range. Epoxy wrinkles are more forgiving for baking and pretreatment issues but they do not have the exterior durability.

Semigloss hammertone, dimple/hammer and vein texture finishes are more challenging to spray. Optimum film thickness for these textures is 3.0-3.5 mils. The most common problem is that the texture will look like it has holes or craters instead of a nice rolling texture. In this case, the gun is most likely not fully energizing the texture additive, try turning the kV up in the 75–100 kV range. If that doesn’t work, you need to turn down the powder flow. Essentially you need more kV per pound of applied powder. The additive needs to be charged well to do its job.

Metallics have similar problems to the hammer textures. You may need to adjust your kV and powder flow settings to get the correct look. The film thickness will also make a difference on how “bright” the metallic looks. Read the datasheet for the appropriate mils range for that particular product and adjust the gun settings to get your look.

Unless requested by the customer, the powder lab sprays special effect coatings with a Nordson Sure-Coat, 75kV, AFC off, 4 mm fan tip, 15 psi flow rate and 5 psi atomizing flow rate. Nordson has a manual on adjusting gun settings which is available from Industrial Sales.