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Will your part survive coating?

Will your part survive the coating cycle?

Coating processes run at very different temperatures. Tell this screener what your part is made of and how it was heat treated, and it will tell you which process families it clears and which one it does not.

Substrate

Does the part include any of these?

Contains a brazed joint Contains a polymer, seal or elastomer Bonded or adhesive assembly EDM finished surface, not stoned back Already coated

Nothing you enter is sent anywhere. The screener runs in your browser.

The four process families

Where the temperatures come from, so you can check them.

Typical process temperature by coating process family
Process family	Typical process temperature	Notes
CVD	1,600 to 1,900 °F	Chemical vapour deposition. Hot enough to require re-hardening and re-tempering afterwards.
Conventional arc PVD	750 to 950 °F	The temperature most PVD job shops run. Fine for high speed steel and hot work grades, above the temper of a great many others.
Commercial low temperature PVD and DLC	350 to 480 °F	Other shops do run cooler processes. Where a part clears this band, SurfTech is one option among several.
SurfTech	Below 200 °F	Published on this site. Below 200 degrees F for the whole cycle.

The first three rows are published typical ranges for those process families, not measurements of any particular shop. Every coater runs its own recipe, so ask yours. The SurfTech row is this plant's own published figure.

What this screener will not tell you

It will not predict a hardness. Working out where a part lands after an unintended temper needs the actual soak time, the actual temperature and the actual grade chemistry. Composing those from typical values produces a range wide enough to be useless, and a single number would be a fiction. If a part has been over-tempered, the people who can tell you what happened are your heat treater and your hardness tester.

It will not give you a distortion allowance. A part expands when it is heated and contracts again on cooling. That is not distortion, and it is not something to machine an allowance for.

It will not tell you a part is safe. Temperature is one failure mode among several. Adhesion, masking, fixturing, geometry and the duty the part sees afterwards all matter, and none of them are in this form. The strongest thing this page will say is that temperature alone does not rule a process out.

It is a screener, not a specification. The answer that matters comes after somebody reads your drawing.

Send us the part

Substrate, heat treatment, duty and the way it fails now. That is enough to work out whether a low temperature film solves it.

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