Case Study 2
Increased productivity with rapid drying paint
1. Situation
The customer manufactures bucket trucks for the transportation of electricity as used for high-voltage poswer lines installations.
The client was facing three major requirements to satisfy its customers and continue to operate as before:
2. Customer requirements
- Get salt spray test (ASTM B -117) for 3,000 hours or more.Get salt spray (ASTM B117) test results of over 3000 hours on steel
- Use of paint products with VOC values less than 3.5 pounds per gallon
- Decrease paint drying time (for primer + paint) from 8 to 4 hours for parts
3. Analysis
- We knew that the challenge was with the primer. Indeed, primers that can provide very high anti-corrosive performance contain zinc and are very slow drying.
- So the key here was to find a primer that could dry very quickly (which is very difficult for a VOC less than 3.5 pounds per gallon) in order not to delay the drying system.
4. Our recommendation
We found an important American paint manufacturer that offers a moisture cure zinc-based primer which dries in less than half an hour and offers an anticorrosive salt spray performance of more than 5000 hours.
Making sure this supplier also offered a polyurethane that could dry in less than 3:30 – that was was the easy part.
5. Results
We have been using this paint system for 9 years and all our objectives have been reached. The system has significantly reduced our client’s production time and no cases of premature corrosion have been reported so far. With these requirements, our client’s main customer will reach a life expectancy of 15 for its fleet.
