Premier Powder Coating - Colour coded

As you know, Powder Coating can be applied to any shape or size of material that will conduct a static charge. It is fairly common knowledge that the process itself gives a hard wearing easy to clean finish, impervious to most chemical or abrasive attacks. With these very practical associations, what else is there to know? Well - probably the most obvious of benefits is the most visible.

Colour.

From the thousands available how do you choose?
a) Simple preference
b) To match your company colours
c) To identify the use of different items
d) To differentiate your components from your competitors components

It isn’t new – Colour choices have been a big issue for centuries – it is no different (or shouldn’t be) in today’s industrial environment.

The desire to create colour uniformity goes as far back as ancient Rome; where “sampling” first became the method for colour matching - but sampling relies on the human eye and a lot of experience in mixing the ingredients that make the colour – and because of the way the human eye varies from one person to the next, the only way to achieve consistency (after a couple of thousand years) was to standardise the actual mix of the materials that made each colour.

The colour range everyone in industry uses, especially in metal fabrication and manufacturing, are the RAL colours – born of necessity and with a fascinating history.

In 1927 the 'Reichs-Ausschuß für Lieferbedingungen und Gütesicherung' fortunately abbreviated to RAL, invented a range of 40 standard colours which became the rule for identification of government organisations – easy to ensure consistency and more cost effective to reproduce.

In stereotypical Germanic style, even what most people would see as essentially the same colour, could be specified to the nth degree to differentiate between organisations.

For example:
Swiss Postal Service RAL 1004 (Golden Yellow)
Austrian Postal Service RAL 1021 (Rape Yellow)
German Postal Service RAL 1032 (Broom Yellow)

These 40 colours (they weren’t all Yellow) became so synonymous with the departments who used them that the range was not fully revised until 1961 when the range became 213 colours, later renamed as “Classic”, to define them amongst a further three RAL ranges, and given supplemental names as additional definition in case of typos in codes.

If you’ve picked up Premier Powder Coating’s guideline wall chart (Give us a call to get your free chart if not) the 213 colours available in the RAL Classic Range may give you everything you need – but those are just the tip of a very large iceberg.

If the reason you choose to powder coat is simply

a) A hard wearing coating, easy to clean, any colour you like etc – we can provide a service second to none. For Inspiration you might want to consider:

b) No one in 1927 talked of Branding Guidelines – but the standards in uniformity they developed would slot straight into the ethos behind a modern branding project. (By using Powder Coating a professional image can be easily extended to the working plant, machinery, safety barriers and rails of your factory or process plant, ready to put you in the memory bank of existing and potential customers (and it looks so much better than stickers).

c) More and more, for reasons of safety and efficient maintenance, a permanent colour coding of stands, pipework and valves allows instant recognition of what each is used for, what is going through them or what they are connected to - certainty at a quick glance without having to pour over schematics or to confirm what is showing on the plans.

d) Fabricated metal components doing the same job from different manufacturers can look very similar once out there – instead of designing into the product a recognisable element that makes no difference to the products compatibility or USP, all it might take is a striking colour to make yours stand out on the warehouse shelf or while doing what it does after installation.

Just a sample of how you might benefit from Powder Coated colour.

To back up your colour choice, the constant standards at Premier Powder Coating are quality and a fast efficient service.

Tel: 01623 528 914
Email: sales@powdercoating-online.com
Web: powdercoating-online.com

Published: 18th February 2020