Durable finishes for lockers, bleachers, lab furniture, and playground equipment
School equipment takes daily abuse from students and weather alike. Great Dane coats lockers, bleachers, lab furniture, and playground equipment with powder coating, electrocoating, or both. We work with districts and with the manufacturers who supply them. Tell us your summer window and we will build the schedule around it.
What education equipment does Great Dane coat?
Great Dane coats equipment found across a school campus. Indoors, that includes lockers, classroom furniture frames, cafeteria tables, shelving, and lab casework. It also includes handrails, door frames, partitions, and equipment housings. Outdoors, it includes playground equipment, bleachers, benches, bike racks, fencing, and light poles. We coat steel, galvanized steel, aluminum, stainless steel, and alloy steels. Two kinds of customers use this page. The first is a district or university refinishing equipment it already owns. The second is a manufacturer that builds lockers, bleachers, school furniture, or playground systems and needs a coating partner. We serve both. The work looks different in each case. A refinishing job runs once, and it has to land inside a narrow calendar window. A production run repeats, and it has to hold color and quality across every batch. Because we run powder coating and electrocoating in two dedicated plants, we can take either one. If you are not sure which process fits your equipment, just ask.
How do powder coating and e-coating protect school equipment?
School equipment gets handled harder than almost anything else. Lockers get slammed, desks get dragged, and bleachers get climbed on daily. Outdoor equipment adds rain, snow, sun, and salt to the list. A finish has to survive all of it. Powder coating applies a charged dry powder that heat cures into a hard film. That film resists chipping, scratching, abrasion, UV fading, and cleaning chemicals. A finish that does not chip matters here for more than appearance. Chipped coating exposes bare metal, which rusts and can leave a rough edge. Electrocoating works differently. Our e-coat system runs an eight-stage zinc phosphate pretreatment, then the electrocoat application. Racked parts enter a charged bath of Axalta AquaEC 6000 series coating. An automatic voltage control system delivers uniform film thickness regardless of the square footage being coated. The film reaches inside welded tube frames, seams, and joints. Playground structures and bleacher understructures are built exactly that way, so they gain the most. For equipment that lives outside, an e-coat primer under a powder topcoat gives dual-layer protection.
Can you match our school colors?
Often, yes we can. School color is identity. A district that refinishes lockers in a shade slightly off from the gym floor logo hears about it. We work from stock colors when speed matters most. Standard colors move quickly because we keep them on hand. For an exact match, we work from special order colors instead. Send us a color chart number, a paint code, a sample panel, or a piece of existing equipment. We will confirm what we can match before you commit to the order. Beyond color, we offer a range of gloss levels and textured finishes. Texture hides scuffs and fingerprints better than high gloss, which matters on lockers and handrails. We also mask the areas that must stay bare. That includes threaded holes, hinge points, latch mechanisms, and contact surfaces. Getting the masking right means the lockers still close properly when they come back. Send us photos or a drawing and we will tell you how we handle precision masking for it.
How does Great Dane work around the school calendar?
Most school facility work has to happen between the last day of class and the first. That window is short, and it does not move. Great Dane runs a 5-day standard turnaround on most work. On a summer project, that turnaround is the whole point. Talk to us in the spring rather than in June. Early scheduling lets us hold capacity for you and stage the work in batches. That way a building is never fully out of service waiting on one shipment. Capacity is the other half of the answer. Our 18,000 square foot powder coating plant and 6,000 square foot e-coating plant handle volume. We also handle the work around the coating. That includes sandblasting, removing the old finish, pretreatment, masking, labeling, and packaging. Labeling matters more than it sounds on a refinishing job. Parts that come back sorted and marked go back on the wall faster, and your crew is working against the same clock we are. One point of contact stays with your project from quote through delivery.
Why choose Great Dane for education coating?
Great Dane has coated industrial parts for manufacturers since 1991. Owner and General Manager Gary Lamolinara has led the company from the very beginning. We offer powder coating and electrocoating from one company, in two dedicated plants. Most competitors offer one process or the other. Offering both means we recommend the process that fits your equipment, not the process we happen to run. Quality is built in upfront rather than caught at final inspection. Plant Manager Colton Adams drove our rework rate from about 3% down below 1%. Our processes are also cleaner than traditional liquid paint. Powder coating uses no solvents and emits negligible volatile organic compounds. There is no solvent smell to air out of a building before students come back. Electrocoating uses a water-based bath and recovers excess material in the rinse stages. Equipment that lasts longer also gets replaced less often, which is its own kind of savings on a facilities budget. We serve schools, universities, and manufacturers throughout the eastern United States and across the eastern seaboard from Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Tell us what you need coated and when you need it back.
Ready to refinish your school equipment?
Send us your equipment list, quantities, colors, and your target date. We will recommend a process, then return a written quote you can take to your purchasing office. Call 724-537-9709 or request a quote today. We deliver on time and on budget, with no hidden fees.
You can learn more about the markets we provide coating services for on our Industries Served page.