THE BUSINESS OF VISCOSITY BLOG

We are fortunate to get the opportunity to tour many manufacturing plants and review a large variety of dispensing processes. One thing that really stands out is that most companies do a good job dispensing. Whether it’s a manual dispensing operation with skilled and experienced operators or an automated dispense with highly repeatable motions, in general, the companies we see are already doing a good job.
When we’re out there, we often hear that either the booth or the plant are already temperature controlled. Often, this is said as if it eliminates the requirement for material temperature control. While definitely an improvement over no control, simply controlling the temperature of your booth and your plant, may not be enough to accomplish your quality and cost objectives.

At an event recently, we struck up a conversation with an Account Manager at one of the major paint suppliers. During our conversation we discussed the batch-to-batch variation of the paints they supply. He said what we often hear from paint suppliers, “Our paints don’t vary much from batch to batch.” When we asked why their customers often have a different perception he said, “Most of the variations that they see are self-inflicted.” That prompted us to request a more in-depth conversation so we could better understand how end users may be unknowingly creating their own batch variations. We thought his insights were helpful, so we decided to share a summary of them here.

Paint problems got you down?   From runs, to improper matte/gloss, to orange peel, there are a great variety of issues that can affect your paint.  And with the short lead-times and incredibly high quality your customers demand nowadays, it can be overwhelming and expensive to deal with these issues.  You need your issue fixed as quickly as possible, so you can get back to profitable production.

The rise of robots has revolutionized automotive and industrial finishing operations over the last several decades.  Robots are uniquely capable of handling those high-precision, repetitive tasks of which humans quickly grow tired.  They can repeat the same path, speed, angle and distance to the part time-after-time-after-time without ever growing tired or taking a sick day.