simple Hi-Tek coating

[Avenger442]

We would really like to help you get it sorted out, too. You seem to have had more trouble than most trying to use Hi Tek. I thought you had it back in February and March when you had success with the Glock. There is obviously something wrong since so many have had the product work. We just can't determine what. After reading post since January I'm quite at a loss as to what we might suggest to help. I thought since we had not seen you post for a while that you had gotten it sorted out. I guess not. Best advice I can give is to find someone close to you that has had the product work and offer them a dinner to come over and help. Looks like some onsite CSI and Q&A is the only thing to do.

You can see under my avatar where I am. And I love to eat.

[sierra1911]

TonyN,
I'd recommend placing one of your thermometers in the middle of your baking tray closely surrounded by the cold boolits. Monitor that thermometer and don't remove boolits from oven until that thermometer has reached 400F and remained at 400F for 4 or 5 minutes. My understanding of the coating is that boolit metal temperature must reach and remain at the coating's curing temperature for a few minutes.

Also, I'd recommend trying a known alloy from Rotometals or a similar supplier to ensure that the problem isn't being caused by contaminants in your range lead.

[dikman]

How much is wiping off? Just a little or lots? Do they pass the smash test? Can you find a bit of pure lead to try?
This is quite perplexing.

As for the 10 mins. I use, as I said I reckon it comes down to the oven as mine, being smaller than yours, heats up a lot quicker so recovers quicker from the door being opened. At least, that's my reasoning.

[Grmps]

Try baking @ 400° until the coating changes color (they will still be good to shoot ) then back off until they don't change color

[HI-TEK]

At least you guys can get your Coating to work properly. I have a house oven for coating and at 12 min at 400F I have complete rub off. I have 2 oven Thermometers I know for sure it's At 400. I'm using indoor Range lead.

Tony N
Just a few things;
1. Even if your oven is showing air as being at 400F, that does not automatically guarantee that the heat in the internal air is being efficiently transferred into your load of alloy.
I will try to explain; I had a guy build a flow through conveyor oven. Plenty of heating elements top and bottom of a wire conveyor. With air inside his oven, the thermometer showed 405F.
He placed a tray onto conveyor and it travelled through oven over 12 minutes.
When tray emerged, alloy at edges was molten metal, and alloy in centre of tray was not baked.
In short, measuring air temperature at a specific point does not guarantee all is well.
I suspect, that you are really not heating your load of alloy to allow proper cure.

2. Air is a very poor conductor of heat. To get heat from hot air inside your oven to transfer into your load, and evenly, you really need a cyclone air circulation inside the oven. This air circulation then forces air movement that comes into contact with your alloy, many, many, many times, which then has result of transferring the heat rapidly and evenly into your product at a very much faster rate. Also, you do not get hot and cold spots in the oven that causes some to be over baked and under baked in same load.

3. Time in oven matters.
The times being suggested as being adequate time for cure, is based upon ideal conditions, where the oven has cyclone air circulation, and adequate capacity to handle the load of alloy being baked.
Unfortunately, every oven has its own quirks. Even same brand and model can vary greatly with performance, so user has to experiment to determine ideal baking conditions and time for his particular equipment with same load.
If oven has poor internal air circulation, this will also cause similar problems you seem to be experiencing.
If coating is removed with solvent after bake cycle, the alloy had not reached correct temperature. It is as simple as that.

My suggestion, which I have made previously is, you test bake only a few, say a dozen or so.
At 10 minute, take out 2, cool and test.
At 12 minute, take out 2 more, cool and test.
At 14 minutes take out 2 more, cool and test.
Keep doing this, until you do not get any wipe off with solvent, and then test with smash test.

This way, you will determine how a small batch will take to correctly bake in your specific oven

If you then load an increased amount into your oven, the baking time will require increasing, to get same results, as you now have a larger weight of alloy that requires heating.

To determine how much longer you need to bake with a larger load, say at after 12 minutes, take out 2 , cool, solvent test, and repeat every 2 minutes, until you get a pass with solvent wipe off.

[ioon44]

I keep a close eye on my thermometers in the oven. I pulled a bullet at 12 min and it wiped off on the acetone test. I'm using a house size oven to do all my baking. If been doing PC but want this Hi_Tek to workout. I don't know how people get away with 8 to 10 min. I make sure the temp stays where it should. I use 1ML per lb. I had a convection toaster oven with a PID and it didn't work either. I will try 15 min. But I would like to see it at shorter timing.

This may have been answered before.
Are you using a solid tray like a cookie sheet or a 1/4" wire mesh tray which would give better air circulation?

[benellinut]

Tony,

Even though I have yet to get a chance to make a first run with HiTek I've followed the two threads closely and had a few thoughts I'd throw out there. If I'm off base then someone please say so but if there is a chance it will help I'd feel bad if I held back. Again, if I'm off base please speak up and let me know, I don't want to add misleading info to the thread, I'd rather be told I'm wrong and delete the info rather then leave it here and mislead future readers.

With a regular house/stove oven, because we have a self cleaning oven my wife refuses to line the bottom with tin foil as a liner to catch drippings, every time she cooks a big turkey we always end up with some of the drippings in the bottom, along with that is a lot of grease. We have always had self cleaning ovens so she just runs it through the cycle to clean it but all that does is bake a really high temperatures to burn away any spillage leaving ash in the bottom to wipe out with a wet paper towel. During that high temp baking that grease first boils and becomes vapors coating the inside (mostly the roof/top panel, hot air rises) of the oven, I can stand there, watch and smell the burning grease smoke rise from the vents, she's the reason I spent the money on an expensive industrial range hood vented outside..... During the next few uses of the oven I can taste a bit of that burnt grease in anything she bakes. So.... I have to wonder, is or was your oven contaminated with any grease that could be contaminating your coated bullets? May be worth the effort to strip the elements and racks out, get some oven cleaner and clean the hell out of the entire inside. If by the odd chance this is an issue your going to chase your tail trying to solve the problem, never solve it and end up concluding HiTek doesn't work.....

The other thing I was wondering, is it a convection oven? If not your going to have cold and hot spots inside it.

Was it once a stove you stripped down to just the oven? Did you remove any insulation? If you striped it down, removing panels will be the same as removing insulation, adding some more can't hurt, just make sure it's high temp insulation.

Last, Don't forget Aussie's idea to lay a few fire bricks in the bottom to help hold an even temp and bring it back up faster once the door is open.

[Avenger442]

I was sitting here reading Joe's last post and had a good illustration of why the air needs to be circulated well. We have been having some moderately cold weather down to 20s F at night. Even had two inches of snow last week. We have electric heat pump type heat and a backup propane fire place that has been on for about an hour. Heat pump is off. I was sitting here on the couch reading and looked at the thermometer sitting on the table next to me. It read 72 F. Got up and turned the ceiling fan on. Temperature now, about 5 minutes later, reads 77 F. That's a five degree change in the air temp from the ceiling air mixed with the air near the floor.

Air circulation may or may not be Tony's problem. It is something that has been stressed over and over if you want consistent color in the tray. You can, and I have, get bullets that the coating will not rub off of without it. But to make sure, you will have to do a very intensive cook. Ones in hottest part of the oven will be darker.

Tony
Offer still open for onsite Q&A. I like steak but will eat hamburgers.

[benellinut]

I was sitting here reading Joe's last post and had a good illustration of why the air needs to be circulated well. We have been having some moderately cold weather down to 20s F at night. Even had two inches of snow last week. We have electric heat pump type heat and a backup propane fire place that has been on for about an hour. Heat pump is off. I was sitting here on the couch reading and looked at the thermometer sitting on the table next to me. It read 72 F. Got up and turned the ceiling fan on. Temperature now, about 5 minutes later, reads 77 F. That's a five degree change in the air temp from the ceiling air mixed with the air near the floor.

Air circulation may or may not be Tony's problem. It is something that has been stressed over and over if you want consistent color in the tray. You can, and I have, get bullets that the coating will not rub off of without it. But to make sure, you will have to do a very intensive cook. Ones in hottest part of the oven will be darker.

Tony
Offer still open for onsite Q&A. I like steak but will eat hamburgers.

Good point, in this old house we have nine foot ceilings on the main floor. I put ceiling fans in the rooms we use most and in the winter months hit the "reverse" switch on the fan and run them on the slowest setting, we don't feel any breeze but it pushes that warm air down and really does make a big difference. Get up on a step ladder and see how much warmer it is with your head next to your ceiling and see for yourself.

Luckily we have baseboard heat and cheap(er) electric here, with the kids grown and gone leaving just the wife and I we only turn heat on the rooms we use. More then half the house we leave the heat off, the entire upstairs is never heated. When they built this old 1890's house they put doors at every doorway which allows the stairway to be closed off because they use to do the same thing when they first heated it with stoves, funny how some old ways come back around to still be very useful today.

[popper]

Second biggest reason I've changed to cooking on a hot plate (with ceramic tile on top to keep temp even). First is I mostly do rifle and it's easier to stand up without dominoes. Coating cooks from inside out, never gets too hot. I did check with thermocouple. Conduction cooking vs convection. I use a thin steel plate covered with NSAF on top of the tile. just pick up with pliers and trade for the next or drop in H2O for H.T.

[TonyN]

I did 5 lbs of projectiles for 15 min. And when I did the wipe test the area tested and some wipe off and some didn't wipe off. So there where some coating that sticked and some of the area the wiped off.

[TonyN]

Did 2nd coat and now had zero wipe off. The coating appered to be for of a shinny and really slick looking and feeling.

[Grmps]

Sounds like you needed more time with that oven. As previously mentioned, you may want to look into some fire brick of something that retains heat to put in the bottom of your oven. If the coating didn't start getting darker, I'd bake it for another couple minutes.
How was the smash test?

[dikman]

If some wiped off and some didn't I'd say you've just confirmed what some have been saying and Joe explained - you've got very uneven heating in your oven.

[TonyN]

No.. The little wipe off is from the first coat. I tested like 3 from all over the wire mesh. The second coat was the one that passed the wipe test.

[TonyN]

I did 3 coats total and I'm getting zero wipe off with 15 min. Bake time. I did the smash test and had zero chipping. If the first coat had some wipe off would that mean the 2 other coats will be ok?

[slide]

Shoot some and see how it goes. I wouldn't be concerned about a little wipe off.

[Avenger442]

I did 3 coats total and I'm getting zero wipe off with 15 min. Bake time. I did the smash test and had zero chipping. If the first coat had some wipe off would that mean the 2 other coats will be ok?

Tony
I have gotten a small amount of wipe off with some of the colors. I've been told that sometimes there is too much of the color added in the mix and that is what causes this. All of them shot just fine as far as accuracy and no lead in the barrel. But it has been on all of the coats not just the first. It sounds like to me that the first coat was not cured. Joe or Trevor can correct me on this but, it looks like to me that if the second and third coat smash test and wipe OK the coating is bound to the lead and cured. Since this stuff cures with heat, the additional heat for the second and third coat probably just finished curing the first coat.

A failed wipe test is when the coating comes off down to the lead when rubbed with solvent for about thirty seconds. If you didn't see that on the first coat your OK. To show you what it looks like take a bullet that has been coated but not baked and rub it with solvent. It will not take thirty seconds to take the uncured coating off down to the lead. Now that's a failed wipe test.

I know you are shooting Glock and I can understand the need to get this right because of the type of rifling. Even though I don't own one I have read enough to know what the problem is with a stock Glock barrel. I think you said you had a Wolf replacement barrel on one so that shouldn't be an issue with it. Would like to note that we have post from multiple people on this blog that have shot Hi Tek in stock Glock barrels with no problem. But since I don't own one I cannot say I have had that experience.

[HI-TEK]

I did 3 coats total and I'm getting zero wipe off with 15 min. Bake time. I did the smash test and had zero chipping. If the first coat had some wipe off would that mean the 2 other coats will be ok?

Tony N,
I have to assume at this stage, that your oven has adequate heating capacity, is reasonably insulated, and has reasonable air circulation/fan operated, and your temperatures are accurate and adequate to cause correct cure. You must concentrate on your alloy temperatures, instead of oven temperatures.
The coated alloy loaded into your oven must get to 180C and stay there, or above, at least 3 minutes afterwards.
How long it takes for your alloy to get to required 180C minimum, will greatly depend on your oven, and loads you place into that oven.
I suggest, you invest in an Infra Red Laser thermometer. Pointing that onto your alloy will tell you actual alloy temperatures.

At this stage, I want to concentrate on your coating drying process of your first coat.

I hate to be abrupt, but did you take any notice of what I advised to you???
To determine what is going on, you need to do exactly as I advised you recently.
I cannot understand, why you would apply multiple coats on the first coat when first coat did not pass tests?
I again repeat, do not coat over first coat, until it passes all tests.

You really are making a rod for your own back, by complicating things, not knowing if coating has bonded or not, and you seem to concentrate on wipe off as your important test parameter, and, multiple coat, when you have no idea if first coat was successful or not..

DO NOT MULTIPLE COAT UNTIL YOU HAVE A TOTAL PASS WITH FIRST COAT

You need to find out, what is going on, using advice I have supplied previously and repeated as below.

1.Coat
2. Dry well, and warm air dry if required, to ensure this first coat is TOTALLY DRY.
3. When you think this first coat is dry, take only a few and bake it.
If after bake it passes all tests, only then cook the rest.
If it fails, continue drying.
After say half hour further drying, again, only test bake a few.
Keep on test baking a few each time, until first coat passes all tests.
ONLY THEN bake the rest of the bulk.
When bulk has been baked with first coat, and passes all tests, ONLY THEN coat a second time.

[Ausglock]

Notice I'n not saying anything on this??

When people ask for help, but ignore the help given.......................

Lovin my refurbished STI TruBor....