Why We Left Powder Coating Behind
Aug 17th 2026
For years, only our structural steel was painted; our balconies, railings were powder coated. Today they aren't - every Dec-Iron product leaves our shop finished with a Sherwin-Williams industrial paint system. Customers ask why, and it's a fair question, because powder coating has a good reputation and it earned it.
Here's the answer: we changed because we found something that serves our customers better. It costs us more to do it this way. We do it anyway.
What we learned in the field
Powder coating works beautifully in the right application. Small, uniform parts, produced in volume, handled carefully - it's tough, efficient, and hard to beat.
That isn't what we build. We build custom architectural metalwork, made to your dimensions, one job at a time, and then we put it on a truck and ship it across the country to your jobsite. Over the years, that reality taught us three things.
First, freight and installation are not gentle. A balcony gets strapped, forklifted, unloaded, staged, and installed by a crew working around other trades. Occasionally something gets nicked. A powder coated chip can't really be fixed - the part has to go back to the coater, be stripped, and be re-shot. A liquid industrial finish can be touched up right there on site, cleanly, with a small can of the same paint.
Second, custom sizes and curing ovens are a bad match. Powder requires the whole assembly to bake at around 400 degrees. A 22-foot custom balcony doesn't fit in most ovens, which means outsourcing to a job shop - more freight, more handling, more chances for damage, and weeks added to your schedule. Finishing in-house puts the quality and the timeline back in our hands.
Third, our decking is wood. Many of our balconies use thermally modified yellow pine. A 400-degree cure cycle simply isn't compatible with that, and we weren't willing to compromise the deck to keep the finish.
What we use now
Every product gets a two-part system: Sherwin-Williams Pro-Cryl Universal Primer on aluminum, or Sherwin-Williams Kem Kromik Universal Metal Primer on steel, over properly prepared metal - topped in both cases with Sherwin-Williams Industrial Enamel. It's the same class of coating specified on structural steel and commercial exteriors. It's two applications instead of one pass and a bake, which means more material and more labor hours on every single unit we produce.
The principle behind the change
We could have kept powder coating. It would have been cheaper and simpler for us, and most customers would never have known the difference until something got chipped in transit.
That's not how we've run this company for twenty years. When we find a better way to build something, we adopt it and absorb the cost. Our job is to hand you a product that performs in the real world - through freight, through installation, through weather, and through the years afterward - not to protect our own margin at the far end of your driveway.
That's the whole reasoning. No marketing angle to it. We shot for the better option and we're glad we did.
Questions about the finish on your project? Call us at 234-564-1814 or request an estimate - we're happy to send the coating data sheets straight to your contractor.