Does powder coating wheels weaken the metal

Yes it does! Unfortunately it makes your wheels as week as Baby Powder. So be careful taking speeds at over .001 g's. You might see a puff of white smoke and feel your brakes hit the concrete.

 

He should be able to get at least 100 miles or so out of them before they fall apart!

 

No. professional opinion.

Lee

 

Definitely not. Powder coating curing temps are typically around 350 - 375 F (177 - 190 C). That's nowhere near high enough to have any effect on the metal. For that, you get a much better quality finish (and less air pollution) than with solvent-based paints. Of course, the process has to be tightly controlled.

 

Wheels are powdercoated by auto manufacturers by the thousands every day.

 

Although powder coating is more durable then conventional paint, your color choices are limited with no factory Ferrari colors available. And as you may or may not know, the factory uses paint on their wheels.

 

You can't see if the rim is cracking with powdercoating. YMMV.

 

Actually the answer is possibly yes, 350 F will change the temper of aircraft alloy aluminum, it really depends how long the wheel is in this temperature range, overall, I would suspect the rims would end up slight harder and more brittle. (The once in a while real life process no one wants to hear about is when you send out the 4 wheels for powder coat, 1 of the 4 gets flubbed, (a drip or dust or something that makes it look bad,) so they strip it by baking it at high temp, scrape it down and re-do it. Customer never knows the difference.) Like I said, no one wants to know what really goes on in the back of the powder coat shop.

Most rims I have seen are alloy 356, additional heat will initially make them slightly harder, and more brittle, if its really over done, the wheel will become softer. Does it really matter, probably not much to the average user but this process is occuring. (The OEM's probably take this into account and let the additional heat from powder coat application bring the final temper to optimal levels.)