Most people are familiar with powder coating as a process used for metal applications, but what about for materials like plastic, wood, MDF, and more?
Technically you can powder coat some other materials, but many times it simply will not work. As long as the material is capable of surviving the high temperatures of a powder-coating bake oven, it can be powder coated, but this often rules out a large number of different materials.
Perhaps the most important consideration when it comes to powder coating objects is a particular object’s ability to withstand the heat needed to get the job done. Most materials simply are unable to survive the extreme heat involved in the process of powder coating.
Every part that is to be powder coated must be baked out after it has been powdered. During this process, it will experience long-term exposure to temperatures of more than 400 degrees. If you attempted to do this with most plastics, wood, rubber, and other types of materials, they would either burn or melt away.
This isn’t to say that powder coating wood or plastic is totally impossible—the technology exists, but it is still very much in the experimental phases. So far, experiments with applications for powder coating these types of materials have been quite successful. However, because that technology is still so new and it relies on some especially large fluidized piping tanks (which are not at all readily available yet), it is still an expensive process, which makes it not particularly attainable or economical for most applications.
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