I never knew how big of a deal restoring old lawn furniture was until this year. I got a call from a nice young couple that had a couple of retro chairs they wanted to restore. When they dropped the chairs off we talked a bit and I found out that they had actually dug these chairs out of a garbage pile on the side of the road. I started by disassembling the chairs which actually was more of a task then expected. Seeing as how these chairs are at least 20 years old and have pr

Rear end housings are one of the easiest hardest parts to coat. The best thing about rear end housings is that most of them come to me either bare metal or with factory paint. That makes these extremely easy to sandblast and prep for powder. They have nice big flat surfaces around most of the openings so masking them isn't difficult either. Where the trick comes in is hanging and moving these things around. Because they are the man place power is transferred to the ground the

We are constantly learning here at TLR Coatings. We don't claim to know it all and every job we do is different. This set of wheels was no different. I learned how much I hate Plasti-Dip on this job. These wheels were brought to my by one of my now regular customers, but this was our inaugural job. When he brought me the wheels I thought oh not bad, set of 17's maybe powdered no big deal. Then I got to one wheel which had the dreaded Plasti-Dip. For those who have no idea wha

In today's blog we are going to talk about a different kind of project we did. While most of the jobs we do are centered around something with a motor and wheels, we can actually coat anything that is metal. From door knobs, to mailboxes, to hand rails we coat it all. My father is a mason by trade, so one day he was replacing a front porch for a customer. They also wanted their hand rails replaced. After doing some searching he discovered that new cast iron railing was not ch

For todays blog we have probably one of the coolest looking pieces I've ever coated. This is a simple Honda Civic stock valve cover and intake. The guys who brought it too me are regulars who own a small import shop and have been bringing me stuff to coat since I started 3 years ago. When they dropped off the parts they liked the gold color but thought well black would probably be better. While talking it over with them the idea hit me to do a fade from one to the other. So a

Today we are going to talk about one of the early projects that the company did. The picture you are seeing is was TLR Coatings first full bike build. This bike was brought to my by a friend of a friend from high school. Im pretty well known throughout the Kalamazoo area as the Honda F4i guy. So when the customer called me and ask me to take a Honda F4i motor and put it in a Honda F4 chassis I jumped at the chance. As long as we had the bike completely torn down we decided to

For this blog post we talk about something that most people have no idea even exists, chrome powder coat. One of my regular customers Matt, brought me his intakes off of his 68 Ford Mustang. They were in decent shape but he told me one simple thing, "Make Them Shiny." I told him, "No problem." So we started by masking every hole off in both of these intakes as best we could so that we could sand blast them. The "Performer" intake in the lower picture took a little bit of time

For my first blog post I thought i would start with a pretty straight forward and easy project we did. My girlfriend was moving into a new apartment with very limited counter space and needed somewhere to put her microwave. On a Saturday shortly before she moved in we were at a garage sale and found this lovely little cart you see in the picture for a whole $5. I brought the cart back to the shop. It showed its age but I knew with just a little work I could bring it back to l