NORTH BEND — Randy Carlton looks tired. He moves quickly when he needs to and offers a firm handshake, but the darkness around his light blue eyes suggests a heavy workload of late.

The North Bend businessman may be busy, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Last May, Carlton opened Max-Pro, a powder-coating business on U.S. Highway 101, next door to the North Bend Public Library.

He used his life savings to buy an application booth, a natural gas oven and myriad other equipment and materials.

But much of the year, customers have been sporadic. At times, Carlton feared he would go out of business. During slow months, he delayed his lease payments. Whenever things looked especially bad, he was buoyed by established businesses referring customers his way.

“The support from businesses in this community is unreal,” Carlton said. “I wouldn’t have made it without them.”

That was before Titan Maritime came calling.

Today, Carlton is still sweating, but not out of financial concern.

For the past three weeks, he has been putting in 14- to 16-hour days preparing a trolley that Titan will use to ferry workers from the beach to the New Carissa work site.

“I’ve been going to sleep here and then getting up and going right back to work,” he said.

The influx in work has led Carlton to hire several temporary workers. He said he hopes to hire two or three permanent employees by the end of the summer and upgrade his facilities with a second application booth and a better compressor.

“It’s really nice to have a project of this size,” Carlton said. “I think it’s going to get us over the hump.”

New profession

Carlton moved to the area in September 2001. At first, he worked at Lumbermen’s, the home-building supplier in Coos Bay, but a neck injury forced him out of the manual-labor field.

As he recovered, Carlton considered his options. After he was well enough, he traveled to Nashville, Tenn., where he was trained in the art of powder coating.

The treatment is used on NASCAR vehicles, firearms and other materials at risk of rusting and decay.

Since the trolley will be sprayed by salt water for months on end, Titan wanted to make sure it would still be serviceable at the end of the project.

It went to Industrial Steel & Supply Co., in North Bend, which is providing shop space to build the trolley, as well as a good amount of steel.

When asked about powder coating,  Jeff Bunnell told Titan it didn’t need to go to Interstate 5 to get the work done. The services are offered down on Highway 101, they said.

“Everyone lives here and has kids in the schools, so the more you can keep business here, the better off we all are,” said Bunnell, Industrial Steel’s general manager.

Carlton expects to spend another week or two preparing the trolley parts for the summertime work. Every individual piece must be treated separately.

Max-Pro’s workers have coated everything from small bolts and handles to hydraulic systems and platforms.

On Thursday morning, Carlton’s employee, Will Charles, donned a mask, set up the powder spray gun and took the hood of the cable car motor into the application booth. He sprayed the hood with a white powder that is electrically charged so it sticks to the metal.

Once the coating has been applied, the metal is moved into an 8-by-8-by-20-foot oven, which is heated to 400 degrees F.

“Everything melts together and creates a shield,” said Carlton, whose face is slightly flushed from working so close to the heat. “Aluminum like this would just fall apart” without it.

Before Charles could move the hood into the oven, he hopped on a forklift and removed a 900-pound hydraulic reservoir that had just finished cooking. Heat waves radiated from the dark black hunk of metal as they moved it outside to cool.

With sidings half an inch thick, the reservoir would take about two hours before it would be cool enough to touch, Carlton said.

The powder coating is five times more durable than paint, he said. If something really needs to be protected, such as some of the moving parts on the trolley, a ceramic material is applied instead.

While the powder is three to five millimeters thick, the ceramic material can be as thin as half a millimeter, and twice as durable.

“It’s tough as nails,” Carlton said.

Finding a business like Max-Pro was a pleasant surprise, said Shelby Harris, salvage master for Titan Maritime. He said Carlton actually suggested some ideas that Titan hadn’t considered in treating their equipment.

“I was more elated, and surprised,” he said. “(Randy) was able to do exactly what we thought we wanted.”

The Florida-based company also has been a good customer, Bunnell said.

“It’s been a good boost for the area, and they are easy to work with. They are small-town people,” he said.

Carlton agrees.

He doesn’t know if Titan will be successful in removing the New Carissa, but he figures if anyone can do it, it will be them.

“These guys are pretty polished. They have been determined, no skimping on price,” he said. “They want the best.”