I'm right on the verge of having to drop a supplier for one of my products. They provide me with aluminum enclosures, drilled, powder coated and UV printed to my specs.
So anyhow, it's just proving too hard to get stuff turned around in a reasonable amount of time, and even the communication has recently gone to pot (Christmas rush? I don't know). Drilling is really not much of a problem. They CNC drill, but I can do just as well with guide pin style fixtures and I would pick up 2 or 3 cheap drill presses and dedicate them to this task. No problem. I'm certain I can find SOMEONE around here to handle batch UV printing work.
The question is powder coat. I'm considering just doing that in house as well. I figure that if I'm doing all this other work too, I may as well just do this as well. I already have a spray booth here. It's setup to just exhaust outside, but I'm thinking that I can just filter it and exhaust straight into the shop since it's pretty much inert. I'm wondering about oven. Is there some economical way that I can bake my items? They're small....about 4"X6"X1.5" aluminum boxes. I only work in batches of 50 or 100, typically, so if I could just bake maybe 5 at a time, I could just spend a few days in my spare time coating and baking, and I'd have the whole run done in a couple of days.
Then all I'd have to do is get the UV printing done, and that seems like it's much easier to get done reliably, and locally, than any other step.
What do ya'll think? Any powdercoat guys out there that can guide me along? Am I crazy? I spray lacquer pretty well, and I know this stuff is a whole lot easier than that, so I think it's doable if I can get the right equipment and process.