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Q&As since 1989
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Need reflective glass beads as additive for powder coating
RFQ:Good Day,
Please advise where we can buy reflective glass bead additive to use in our powder coating process to achieve a reflective metal sign frame that will show up at night. This will be similar the reflective paint on the roads. Thanking you all in advance for your prompt help.
steel sign frames - Saint Petersburg, Florida, USA
2004
Ed. note: Sorry, this RFQ is old & outdated, so contact info is no longer available. However, if you feel that something technical should be said in reply, please post it; no public commercial suggestions please ( huh? why?)
Q. Is there a micro reflective bead additive that you can use with powder coating ?
Barry Smith- Willoughby Ohio
July 14, 2014
Reflective Glass Beads Trial pack of four sizes & qualities
on
Amazon
(affil links)
A. Hi Barry. Beads have to stick approximately halfway out for best performance. Too small and most of them will be "buried" and wasted, reducing the quality of the powder coating without contributing anything; too large and there will be too much leverage against them and they won't be sufficiently "glued" to stay in place .
I'm no expert on this but my understanding is that the beads used on streets are an assortment of sizes rolled into the wet paint, whereas with powder coating you'd probably want the beads to be a fairly uniform 60 - 120 microns; I believe there is an "airport quality" bead that is sifted to a rounder and more uniform mesh size, but it's probably too big for the usual thermoset powder coatings; it may be perfect for thick thermoplastic powder coatings. I don't think any additive except the beads themselves is required, but then again, that's only a guess :-)
Regards,
Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
July 2014
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