About me

Why this site exists

Most powder coating information online is written by people selling equipment or powder. That is not a complaint about them — it is just that a supplier’s job is to explain why their product is the answer, and that is a different job from explaining what the answer actually depends on.

I have spent more than ten years on the other side of that conversation. I have commissioned guns and ovens, been called in when a line produces rejects nobody can explain, designed equipment packages for parts I had never seen until the samples arrived, and spent years on the supply side of the Chinese equipment industry. I currently work at a leading Chinese powder coating gun manufacturer.

What I write here is the part of that experience that is useful to someone else: how to tell which of five possible causes is the real one, when a cheaper machine is genuinely enough, and what actually goes wrong when a plant buys equipment from China.

How I got here

I started with installation and commissioning — the least glamorous and most educational work in the industry. The first lesson is always the same: most defects that look like equipment faults are grounding, pre-treatment or cure. Once you have seen that pattern thirty times, you stop trusting the obvious explanation.

From there I moved into technical sales and solution design. That is where I learned that the specification matters more than the machine. Two plants with the same budget and similar parts end up with very different lines, and the difference is almost always whether somebody calculated the oven from real part mass instead of copying a quotation.

Today, working with a manufacturer, I see the whole chain: component suppliers, equipment builders, integrators, coatings brands and the buyers at the end. It is a useful vantage point, and it is why I can talk about technical performance, cost and lead time in the same sentence instead of pretending they are separate subjects.

What I write about

Five areas, in roughly the order I encounter them:

• Process and materials — charging, film build, cure, and which variables you can move without spending money.
• Equipment — guns, lines, recovery and ovens: what each category is for, and where it is not worth buying.
• Troubleshooting — defects, ranked by how often each cause turns out to be the real one rather than the one that gets blamed first.
• Industry — where capacity is moving, what plants are buying, and what that means for anyone planning a line.
• Sourcing and cost — why quotations for the “same” line differ by three times, and how to buy without getting burned.

How I work

• Everything here is from my own experience. No sponsored posts, no paid placements, no competitor bashing.
• I name brands only when the example requires it — never because someone paid for it.
• I do not publish client specifics. No customer names, no plant data, no drawings that are not mine to share. Where I use an example, the details that identify the client are removed or changed.
• If I am not sure, I say so. Where a number depends on your part, your oven or your powder, I will give you the range and tell you what it depends on, rather than inventing a figure that looks authoritative.

Working with me

Short technical questions are free — describe the part and the problem and I will answer. For line sizing, equipment selection, factory vetting and on-site work, I take on a limited number of paid engagements.

Details are on Work with me. If you just want to ask something, send it over.