Winona Powder Coating Receives AAMA 2604 Certification

Winona Powder Coating (Etna Green, Ind.) has exceeded the standards required to receive AAMA 2604 Certification from AkzoNobel (Reading, Pa.), making Winona a certified applicator of AkzoNobel for Architectural Powder Coatings Technologies. The companies say AAMA 2604 is a rigorous standard that few powder coaters in the US have met.

AkzoNobel carries out full audits of its Interpon D Approved Applicators on a defined basis and frequently performs random spot checks to assess their continuing ability to comply with the approval criteria. In addition to audits, the applicator must also submit finished parts annually for AkzoNobel to test.

Interpon D Approved Applicators’ test laboratories must contain specific equipment suitable to carry out required testing, which the applicators must perform at defined intervals with specified methods to ensure pretreatment consistency, correct curing, and required film performance on finished articles.

Quality assurance measures at Winona include essential processes like a three-step pretreatment, which involves cleaning, rinsing and chemical conversion of the specific surface.

The ovens at Winona that cure powder-coated parts go through routine preventative maintenance to ensure that each part is fully cured. The parts then undergo a thickness test to ensure that equipment coatings maintain an optimal thickness of 2 – 3 dry mils (thousandths of an inch).

Lastly, Winona’s quality assurance program includes gloss evaluation, cure confirmation and adhesion testing. Gloss evaluation is a process that inspects every product before shipment to confirm absences of bubbles, gaps in coverage, warping or insufficient coating application. Cure confirmation ascertains there are no dry and brittle overbake areas, or underbake areas that require further curing. Adhesion testing then measures how well the powder paint sticks to the part once it is fully cured. As with the cure test, overbaking or underbaking can alter the adhesion test results.