This doesn’t really belong here, but since there’s so many great and experienced minds around I might ask here as well.
A local industrial finishing company is buying a new powder finishing oven, making their oldest and smallest one superfluous. I have indications I may be able to acquire it for about $1000, plus transport ($500) and our costs to install (~$2000). The owners basically just want to get rid of it for a pick-up fee.
I don’t have a brand and model number, but its internal depth is ~2300mm, width ~1600mm, height ~1400mm. I think it draws 22kW max (though I may have misunderstood that). It comes complete with two carts, dedicated ventilation and fire safety equipment. Heat up time approx. 20 minutes.
It is reportedly in very good condition, having had heating elements replaced, has always been very well cleaned and maintained, etc. I trust the reporting party, they offered us a paint mixer unit for free and it was great but we didn’t have a real need for it and it had a rather large footprint for where it needed to be placed so we turned it down.
We can presumably fit the oven into our finishing area, with some re-disposition of spaces and dismembering of one wall.
Now, this is obviously a better-than-great price for this type of equipment. I’ve read the data sheets for our most common types of two-component finishes, and our current setup has a time-until-stack of 3-5 hours with the time-to-stack with a unit like this would be 3-5 minutes (not counting flash-off).
Still, I’m not really sure. Does anyone here have any experience with this kind of equipment? Is it hard to break in? Are results consistent? Is it costly to maintain?
Also, apart from two-component finishes, is there any way we could get into powder finishing? I’ve seen the XIOM approach, but that doesn’t apply here.