Manhattan Powder Coating Can Make Your Antique Restoration Business More Efficient
DIY and History Channel programming have cultivated a growing interest in the markets for antiques, restoration, and rebuilding old machines from a handful of broken parts. Many Mahhattan home owners and business owners are looking for unique items to place in their homes, stores and retail spaces. But the programs skip over a lot of the complicated day-to-day tasks of carefully restoring, repairing, and painting antiques to a beautiful and functional finish. We know what it takes to get the right look from your antiues. For the best Manhattan powder coating, visit TLC metal. We offer a full range of powdercoating services for your one-off antique excursion or full-time antique business.
This means it’s more important than ever to set your business apart as a professional antique restoration company that delivers quality results, but your business still needs to generate a profit even while prices fluctuate. One of the best ways to do that is to incorporate powder coating into your refinishing process, primarily through a third-party provider that makes your workflow, budget, and operations more efficient.
Take the finishing offsite.
Tech companies are streamlining their business processes by using third-party providers to handle all of their business functions aside from their core offering, and that trend is quickly spreading to other industries because it works: focus on your core business offerings of antique restoration and repair while hiring others to apply paint or manufacture replacement parts. Not only does this let you concentrate your investments and your employees on what you specialize in, but it can also save you more money than keeping operations strictly in-house.
Even industrial premises in New York City have a host of permit requirements, materials regulations, and air quality concerns that can restrict your business. The cost of maintaining correct paperwork, filing for VOC usage and obtaining environmental permits, and having space for safe storage and use of commercial paints can eat into your bottom line.
More than that, traditional painting isn’t the best method anymore, even for restoring painted antiques. Powder coating offers all the benefits of paint, such as colors and finishes matching, detailed application, and chemical protection from water, UV radiation, and pollutants, but with fewer environmental consequences, waste, and future retouching.
Calculate the costs of your onsite painting operations, including everything from the staff-hours to the equipment and supplies, and compare it to the costs of offsite powder coating. For an even starker picture, consider the total costs of maintaining part of your premises as the right environment for powder coating; even though it delivers a superior finish that lasts longer without peeling or fading, it’s not necessarily something you can directly incorporate into your facilities, so hand it off to a third party. Not only will it cut down on your total expenses and stress, it means you get an expert, specialized top coat without having to specialize in it yourself.
Reduce wasted application materials.
Inefficiencies add up, no matter what business you’re in. One of the best ways to keep your costs low is to find processes that have an output as close to your input as possible. Unlike with wet paint, which can have a lot of wasted product either through the application on unwieldy antiques, sanding and recoating, or inefficient coating, powder puts all of the product to use and preserves the rest.
Even wasted material of 1-3% per project can add up over time, mainly if your business plan is based on high volume or passing savings on to customers. When you contract with a powder coating company instead of a traditional paint applier, you can tap into those savings on raw material costs, as well as labor, clean-up, and applied materials costs, which could have added even more onto your costs for a comprehensive renovation.
Use the powder coating for antiques components.
If you’re handed a rusting antique machine, such as an old Coca-Cola vending machine or a cash register, you have to have refinishing processes that provide both an aesthetically pleasing surface coat to the wide exterior sides of the machines and a coat to complex machinery parts that won’t wear away through extended contact or use.
The process of powder coating builds a thin ‘skin’ around the whole exterior of the coated surface, even on intricate details and textures. It doesn’t build up to hide detail with excess material, which also makes the finished product look more like the antiques in their original state. This means you can find the colors your customers want for both the inside and outside of the antiques and use the same top coating process. This keeps your operations efficient because you can use the same third-party powder coating operation for more of your process, decrease the number of steps in your business’s workflow for each restoration, and decrease transition time between steps in your jobs.
Powder coating also provides an increasing array of options so you can still get parts with different textures and finishes done at the same place. If you need wrinkled texture that matches an old appliance’s original finish, a matte lack of sheen to add that extra layer of authenticity or even a roughened texture that hides repaired rust patches and dents in the original material, powder coating can deliver those finishes even as it gives the interior gears a smooth top coat. The value of this is efficiency: use one trusted partner for coating, so you have one drop-off and one delivery per product instead of dropping it off at different shops in the city.
Powder coating is perfect for high-impact surfaces and edges.
Antiques aren’t just for visual displays. Whether you specialize in jukeboxes, neon signs, or antique machinery, more and more people want their collections of artifacts and old heirlooms both to look good and work. Powder coating helps the finishing touches stay in place for years, especially on high-contact surfaces, edges, and touching parts. Many novelty machines showed their internal gears behind a layer of protective glass, and you don’t want the finish on those gears to wear away within just a few years, even if they spend those ensuing months grinding against each other and making the machine run. Powder coatings are particularly resilient on edges because of the application method, and any dents or wear on the top coating won’t spread or scratch away like with paints and finishing materials.
This high-impact protection gives your customers greater versatility in how they use their goods: they can safely use old diner booths and tables in their dining room or a restaurant, they can display working arcade machines and allow customers to play on them, and they can integrate antique chandeliers and lights throughout their property. Because the coating is both durable in its own rights and protects the underlying material from damage and degradation, you can market your restoration services as more than just visual restoration; it allows the product to be used as it was initially made.
The behind-the-scenes work for antique restoration can be tremendously rewarding and profitable, but it will take smart business decisions, specialization, and increased efficiency to stay ahead. Contact TLC Metal to see if powder coating is the right match for your restoration business and how we can work with your workflow to get your jobs coated quickly, efficiently, and within your budget.