PRE-TREATMENT FOR POWDER COATING

Powder coating offers a beautiful finish to your aluminium profiles, but to ensure you get that smooth, even coat, your aluminium needs to be well prepared and free of any dirt or oil, which can prevent colour perfectly coating the surface.

This is where pre-treatment comes in.

In this blog, we'll be exploring why pre-treatment is so important for your aluminium profiles - especially when it comes to achieving a flawless finish. 

What is pre-treatment?

Pre-treatment is the process of chemical preparation of your aluminium profiles before applying a powder-coated surface finish. Pre-treatment is crucial for a long-lasting finish to your powder coated profiles.

Pre-treatment will:

• Heighten the performance of powder coating
• Reduce your powder coated aluminium’s susceptibility to rust, corrosion, or damage
• Increase your aluminium’s life span (once powder coated)
• Help the powder coating bond more effectively to create an elegant surface finish

Our 5-stage pre-treatment process

At BWC Profiles, we follow a rigorous 5-stage pre-treatment process to ensure every aluminium profile is ready for powder coating:

1. Degrease – we use a specially formulated cleaner, to degrease (and not liberate silicon) from the aluminium profile.
   
   
2. Cold running water rinse, to stop the cleaning action.
   
   
3. Acid etch – this pre-treatment step is designed to reduce the gloss of the substrate and remove the die lines or flow lines present on all extruded profiles.
   
   
4. Cold running water rinse – this step is in place to stop the etching action.
   
   
5. Conversion coating, ‘Walterisation 7460’ – this final step produces a coating on the substrate that when powder coated, gives excellent corrosion resistance.

If you’d like to know more about our powder coating service and the full range of colours (standard and bespoke) available, please contact us or visit our Powder Coating and Finishing page.