Design Nomenclature / Physical Model Making
Powder coating
Also called powder coat, electrostatic coating
Electrostatically spraying dry pigmented polymer onto a grounded part, then flowing it out in an oven. The film is thick — 60 to 100 microns — so it rounds every edge and softens every fine detail it crosses. Tough and cheap for enclosures, and exactly wrong for anything whose crispness was the point.
Not to be confused with
- AnodizingGrowing a controlled oxide layer on aluminium electrolytically. The layer is porous as it forms, takes dye, then gets sealed — so the colour lives inside the metal rather than on it. It adds microns, which matters to a press fit, and it will not build over a scratch: whatever the surface was, it stays.
- PrimerA coating formulated to stick to the substrate, be stuck to, and sand. It is neither paint nor filler: high-build primer fills tool marks a few thousandths deep and no more. Its real job is to make one optical surface out of five different materials, so the colour coat reads as a single object.