Concerns autocrossing powdercoated RPF1s?

Many wheels are powder coated from the factory as someone said.
When I powder coat stuff, I usually pre-bake at 400 F and cure at 325 F. I 'coated wheels for a GRMer's rally car. He's seen no issues. This was done after stripping the factory powder coat off the wheels.
I plan on powder coating my wheels. I read a lot of stuff before I agreed to 'coat the wheels for the guy and nobody had every shown that they had a set of wheels that had an issue due to powder coating.

Lots of anecdotes but no real evidence.

DrBoost wrote: I read a lot of stuff before I agreed to 'coat the wheels for the guy and nobody had every shown that they had a set of wheels that had an issue due to powder coating.

I'm curious: If over-aging aluminum simply reduces both the strength and fatigue life...How exactly have you been able to differentiate that a there was no reduction in strength and fatigue life due to any over-aging that occurred during an above-aging-temp powder coating bake(s) of a failed wheel, or that any reduction in mechanical properties resulting from some amount of over-aging during the powder coating bake(s) was not a contributing factor to the failure of a wheel?

Note that powder coating applied during the manufacturing process should not have these same concerns.

The high end of powdercoating temperatures overlaps the low end of the aging temperatures used for 6061-T6 aluminum.

Will it cause immediate failure? No. Does it guarantee future problems? No. CAN it cause problems? Yes. Is it something that will void the warranty on some wheels due to this risk? Yes. Are lightweight wheels used in a high stress situation the worst cause scenario for a potentially weakened wheel? Yes.

I've decided that I don't like wheel failures, so I actually destroyed a set of race wheels after powdercoat once I learned the science. It wasn't worth the risk. The big burly Ronal wheels on my Vanagon have also been powdercoated, but since they are such an overbuilt wheel in a very low stress use I'm not worried.

In my experience, most wheels are painted and not powdercoated at the factory.

Of the many machines that I tend to at work one of them insan industrial Nordson Electrostatic Powder System. I've become quite familiar with elecrostatic and standard powder coating procedures. While I imagine a few people run out beyond 350 our processes work best on a 325 base setting. We see fluctuations due the the amount of parts in the oven sonour actual temps vary from 315-340f Keep in mind that what we are coating just came through a braze process that dragged a little pile of aluminum through a 605c furnace! It's amazing what that stuff can handle.

Get the wheels. Break them if you have to.

maj75 wrote: Lots of anecdotes but no real evidence.

Yeah. Seems like we've covered all of the common arguments that I found across the Internet while researching, so atleast we're thorough!

At this point, I'll likely stay away. The fact that there's no way to verify how these were coated, and that my application would be about the worst case scenario (super light wheel design with no excess material/ wide, sticky tires/ kinda high stresses) leaves me hesitant to take that risk.