Cerakote

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The Toughest Coating

Our customers love Cerakote for its extreme toughness, abrasion resistance, UV protection, and color options. Cerakote is perfect for end-use consumer products and heavy industrial applications.

See Technical Data Sheet on Cerakote

The Process

Cerakote is a two part ceramic based coating. After printing and depowdering of the models, the liquid Cerakote parts A and B are mixed at the appropriate ratio. The Cerakote is poured into a special airbrush gun and sprayed onto the model at a thickness of ~.001". Once the coating has been applied, the parts are taken to an oven and cured at 180 degrees for 2 hours. Nylon 12 has a high enough glass transition temperature that warping is rare, but a possibility on extremely thin parts.

The "sandy" surface texture of a tumbled part off of the MJF printing process is perfect for coating with Cerakote. The pores of the nylon perfectly absorb the coating and create an incredibly strong bond. The coating is so strong that we can actually bead blast the coating at over 100 PSI for several minutes without damaging the coating at all.

Uses

Cerakote is most famous for its use in firearms. A competition pistol could be reholstered hundreds or thousands of times during a shooting session in dirty conditions without showing signs of wear.

In testing, Cerakote has outperformed legacy coatings such as powder coating, anodizing, PVD, and Nitride in color fastness, oxidation, abrasion resistance, and chemical resistance. For more information, visit Cerakote's website.