A major trend in the thermal spray industry has been to increase the gas jet velocity to obtain better coating attributes. One emerging technology now used in industry is the high-velocity oxygen fuel process (HVOF). High-velocity spray guns combine oxygen and a fuel gas to generate heat and extremely high particle velocities. In this study, Inconel 718 powder was deposited on steel substrates. The primary coating function was electrical resistivity for a heater application. Experiments were conducted using a Taguchi L8 statistical fractional/factorial design parametric study. The Taguchi experiment evaluated the effect of six HVOF processing variables on the measured responses. The parameters were oxygen flow, fuel flow, air envelope gas flow, powder feed rate, spray distance, and nozzle configuration. The coatings were characterized by hardness tests, surface profilometry, optical metallography, and image analysis. This article investigates coating hardness, porosity, surface roughness, deposition efficiency, and microstructure with respect to the influence of the processing parameters. Analytical studies were conducted to investigate gas, particle, and coating dynamics for two of the HVOF thermal spray experiments.