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Wet-spray industrial painting for metal and plastic parts and assemblies. Epoxy primers, polyurethane topcoats, zinc-rich primers, wash primers and CARC, applied to the specification on the drawing. AS9100D and ISO 9001:2015 registered, ITAR Registered.
We run both processes in the same building, so we have no reason to sell you either. On bare steel weldments powder is usually tougher per mil and cheaper at volume — see what we do in powder →. Here is where liquid is not a compromise.
Powder builds. Where the print holds system thickness to a fraction of a mil, or a bore or thread must stay dimensionally correct, powder overshoots the callout before it flows.
Powder needs an oven. Bearings, seals, adhesives, potted electronics, low-temperature plastics and tempers you cannot disturb rule it out. Liquid cures near ambient, so an assembly stays assembled.
Military and aerospace flow-downs specify a stack — pretreatment, primer, topcoat — each by number. Those stacks are built around liquid chemistry; there is no powder equivalent to substitute.
Damage is feathered, cleaned, primed and resprayed to the same system without stripping the part. Powder cannot be spot-repaired to its own system.
Anything too large or oddly shaped to hang and oven-cure can still be sprayed, including recesses a powder gun cannot charge evenly.
Class A surfaces, metallic flakes, special-order tints and color matching. We are an approved applicator for DuPont and PPG Keeler & Long coatings.
The workhorse under almost every military and aerospace topcoat, supplying the corrosion resistance and the adhesion the topcoat lives on. Solvent-borne and waterborne, chromated and chrome-free, are not interchangeable because the color matches. If your flow-down restricts hexavalent chromium, or requires material from a qualified source, say so on the purchase order.
Where gloss, color, UV stability and fluid resistance come from, and why most current systems call one out over an epoxy primer. They are unforgiving about what sits beneath: over a contaminated surface, or a primer past its recoat window, a polyurethane looks right on the day and fails in service.
Galvanic protection, not barrier protection. The film is loaded with zinc, so a scratch to bare steel corrodes the zinc preferentially and the steel does not undercut — hence structural steel, skids and anything that gets chipped. They demand a clean, correctly profiled blast, and organic and inorganic versions differ.
The layer buyers forget to specify, then wonder why adhesion failed. A wash primer or conversion pretreatment etches and passivates the metal so the primer has something to hold; on aluminum it does most of the corrosion work. We degrease in a phosphate solution first. A pretreatment named by number is part of the specification.
A bonded solid-film lubricant — molybdenum disulfide or PTFE carried in a resin binder — sprayed and cured like a coating rather than applied like a grease. It goes on fasteners, cams, bushings, hinges and anything that has to slide or break loose cleanly where oil would attract grit or is not allowed. MIL-PRF-46010 heat-cured and MIL-PRF-46147 air-cured are the callouts you will usually see. The film is thin, but thin still matters on a thread, so send the class and the mating condition with the drawing.
A complete system — pretreatment, primer and a topcoat that resists absorbing chemical agents and can be decontaminated — not a color you can order. It carries its own infrared reflectance requirements and documentation discipline. We quote CARC and provide the certification the work requires. Full detail: what is CARC coating →
Working from a number you cannot place, or a superseded callout? Decode it at the MIL-spec coating cross-reference → or start with MIL-spec coating information →.
Powder is one pass: prep, spray, bake, ship. A liquid finish is three layers — pretreatment, primer, topcoat — each with its own specification, pot life, film thickness, cure and recoat window. The part sits between coats. That is the process, not slack.
Every primer has a minimum time before it can be topcoated and a maximum after which it cannot. Too early, trapped solvent blisters the topcoat. Too late, the primer has finished crosslinking and nothing is left chemically open to bond into.
Miss the top of that window and the primer must be scuffed by hand to create a key — on internal geometry, more work than the original spray — or stripped where the specification forbids abrading. The numbers come from the data sheet and the specification.
A liquid part therefore carries dwell time a powder part does not. Build it into your date, and tell us up front if you plan staggered batches or a hold mid-stack. Geometry is in the coating design guide →; lot control and paperwork in buyer and engineer information →.
When a coating peels, blisters or lifts at a scribe, the paint is rarely the cause. Oil, mill scale, weld smoke, soluble salt, a profile too shallow to key into or too coarse for the film, or a surface left long enough between blast and prime to flash-rust — those are. Prep is part of the specification.
Two things get measured. Cleanliness: how much mill scale, rust and old coating came off — what the blast-cleanliness grade on your drawing describes. Profile: the anchor pattern the media leaves, which must fall inside the range the primer’s data sheet calls for. Too smooth and nothing grips; too coarse and peaks read through a thin film.
Threads, bores, bearing surfaces, connector faces and grounding points come back clean and conductive, and each must be marked before we quote — unmarked masking is why quotes and invoices disagree. Surface prep, masking and blasting → · masking for coating →
Parts are inspected before shipment. A finish over anodize, plating or passivation is the plating side of the business — glecoplating.com — and under one roof → explains the handoff.
Most drawings identify color with a five-digit AMS-STD-595 number — formerly FED-STD-595, which is why both names appear on live prints. The first digit sets the gloss family: gloss, semigloss, or lusterless and flat. So 34094 and 24084 differ in gloss as well as color, and the right chip at the wrong gloss is a reject.
The chip fixes appearance and nothing else — not resin chemistry, not the primer beneath it, not film thickness, not qualification. Two coatings can hit the same chip under different specifications with different service lives. Send the system specification and the color number.
Some military topcoats add a requirement your eye cannot check: infrared reflectance. The coating must reflect near-infrared so equipment matches natural background under night vision — a commercial paint mixed to the same chip will not. Legends and panel markings are silkscreening →, done here as well.
If the part takes an oven, has no thin-film constraint, and the drawing does not name a liquid system, powder is usually the better buy. Otherwise liquid.
| What you are facing | Better fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Bare steel weldment, no heat limit | Powder | Tougher per mil, better at volume, single pass |
| Thickness held to a fraction of a mil | Liquid | Powder builds past the callout before it flows |
| Seals, electronics or low-temp plastic inside | Liquid | No oven cure required |
| Drawing names a military system by number | Liquid | Those stacks are liquid; no substitution |
| Field-serviced, drilled or welded after coating | Liquid | Spot-repaired to the same system |
| Oversized or awkward to hang | Liquid | Sprayed without an oven pass |
| Maximum abrasion resistance at volume | Powder | Thicker, harder, faster |
| Extreme wear plus thin film plus heat | Cerakote | Ceramic, thin, harder than either |
The long comparisons live on their own pages: powder coating vs liquid paint → · paint vs powder vs Cerakote → · Cerakote at Rowlett → · finish selector →
The shop is at 5020 Grisham Drive in Rowlett, east of Dallas. Most liquid work comes from fabricators, machine shops and OEMs across the metroplex: defense and military coating →, aerospace coating →, electronics enclosure coating →, industrial and energy equipment → and job shops and fabricators →.
City pages with directions and local detail: Dallas → · Garland → · Mesquite → · Richardson → · Plano → · Irving → · Carrollton → · Arlington → · Grand Prairie → · Fort Worth → · full service areas →
A PDF drawing is fine, with quantity and required date. Registrations are on certifications and approvals →; the specification library sits in resources →.
Usually — it is a main reason to choose liquid. Curing near ambient means an assembly with bearings, seals, adhesives or potted electronics can be painted without being torn down. Tell us its maximum safe temperature and mark surfaces that must stay clean or conductive.
The span between the earliest and latest time a primer can be topcoated. Too early and trapped solvent blisters the topcoat; too late and the primer has finished crosslinking, so the topcoat cannot bond into it and the primer must be scuffed by hand — or stripped, where the specification forbids abrading. A liquid part therefore carries dwell time a powder part does not.
Yes — the standard is now issued as AMS-STD-595; both names refer to the same chips. But a chip number is not a specification: it fixes appearance and gloss and says nothing about chemistry, primer, thickness or qualification. Send the system specification with it.
Yes. We quote CARC and provide the certification the work requires. CARC is a complete system — pretreatment, primer and a chemical-agent-resistant topcoat with infrared reflectance requirements — not a color. See our CARC page. Send the full callout with revision.
Yes — it is the core case for liquid. Heat-treated parts, thin sections that would distort, low heat-deflection plastics and anything with heat-sensitive components inside can be sprayed without an oven cycle. Give us the maximum temperature it tolerates.
Parts are inspected against the specification before shipment, and we provide the certification the specification and your purchase order call for, including CARC and other MIL-spec work. Tell us at RFQ what your quality system needs on it.
Yes — metal and plastic parts, including bezels, housings, radar antennas and electronics enclosures. Plastics need their own adhesion promoter and cure limits, so identify the resin on the RFQ.
Industrial painting in Rowlett and across DFW. We will tell you plainly whether liquid or powder suits your part — including when the answer is powder.
