72 Duster Resurrection

Duster Captain said
Hello Leanna! Thanks for chiming in, sounds like you are the right lady to talk to about coatings! Totally dig the work I see on your website, very nice. If I ever get real serious about this I may email you...

The more I see, the more I think the powder job on the control arms I bought was......sub standard.

What would you say is the most effective way to strip the powder out of these areas if you had to pick? Sandblast? Stripper? Wire wheel? I am not a stickler for perfection or "show quality", so I dont care about possibly chewing up the rest of the coating.

First off, thank you both for checking out some of my work and for the awesome compliment!

As far as the "effectiveness" goes, since your suspension parts aren't really a huge amount of surface area and it seems you're a pretty hands-on kind of guy, you might consider just burning it all off (or at least getting it really crispy) with a propane flame thrower, wire brush off the bigger chunks and then blast off any remnants, and start over from scratch with a spray bomb paint job.

Being in a larger metro area like Houston, you might even be able to find a large job shop with a real burn-off oven which will completely remove all the existing powder and leave you with bare metal. Not living in a large metro area (Greenfield is out in the sticks with the cows and corn lol), I can't say how much that might cost you to get done but would bet it would save you a lot of time and hassle, purchasing a bunch of powder stripper you won't use or going through a ton of sand paper or wire wheels. If you have a dedicated shop oven (or access to one at a friend's house), you can try heating the parts up to as high as the oven goes and leave them in there for a few hours. It will basically overcure the powder and can sometimes make it easier to blast off but, again, it depends on how good the prep was when it was powder coated originally.

You already know the chemical strippers are costly. Sanding it is going to take forever. A wire wheel will be faster but it can also destroy your wheels really quickly and leave them all gummy once they cool off (and they'll pretty much be unusable afterwards). You'll have to just weigh the cost and time involved in each method and see if it might be best to farm them out.

I hope this helps some.