Factory paint.....

I don't care WTF type car is IS......when touring the Baltimore Md. Sparrows point plant years ago....we not permitted to see the paint booth....

when seeing BG assy plant in '99, we not allowed to see the paint booth...

I forget the excuses....don't matter....

question IS.....if GM/F/BMW/Merc/Mutso/Ch etc can paint cars at a rate of one every ten seconds.....that means the paint is in the booth and on the car, and so they heat it to dry it off, of course....

that don't slow the production rate one second.....the question IS....

how do they apply the paint so consistantly and even that it don't run, smear, and so forth???

I know it'a a automated thing....but just what type paint they use to get such consistant results???

THAT is the paint I want to use....none of this sanding polishing by hand crap....on the car and out the door.....

so???

I painted my yellow '68 with DuPont Chroma One (single-stage) this winter and it came out as smooth or smoother than a new car. Great gloss...didn't need to cut and buff it. I just can't stand even fine orange peel. Slick as glass now.

big_G said:

I painted my yellow '68 with DuPont Chroma One (single-stage) this winter and it came out as smooth or smoother than a new car. Great gloss...didn't need to cut and buff it. I just can't stand even fine orange peel. Slick as glass now.

Click to expand...

OK SOLD, who sells it,???

nice house BTW.....


:thumbs:

Manufacturers all use ovens, different ball game. Paint will stick and flow at the same time and nothing ever varies.

mrvette said:

big_G said:

I painted my yellow '68 with DuPont Chroma One (single-stage) this winter and it came out as smooth or smoother than a new car. Great gloss...didn't need to cut and buff it. I just can't stand even fine orange peel. Slick as glass now.

Click to expand...

OK SOLD, who sells it,???

nice house BTW.....


:thumbs:

Click to expand...

Thanks....Any DuPont paint jobber will sell Chroma One. We (my shop) almost always use single stage paints on solid colors. No worries about cutting through the clear coat when wet-sanding/buffing.

Here is a link to DuPont jobbers near you.:http://dupont.geoserve.com/scripts/esrimap.dll?Name=L&Com=adr&Db=DLRDPC&Ds=Jobber&RT=lo&LIM=500&Filt=User10%3D%271%27&Cn=US&Zp=32073&Ci=&St=&Br=1

Would love to see how they do it one too. From what I understand there are no windows, no peepholes, and it is a totally controlled environmental super clean room. i.e. BIG clean room! The paint line is cleaner than most operating rooms. As I understand workers are tested for excessive skin cells, hair and dandruff coming off, unbelievable, but guess that's how they produce a dust free paint job. I have been told that GM uses Dupont products, true???? Do not know.

tt

Worked in GM's paint plants in Europe (Vauxhall/Opel) for 12 years before moving to the states.

When I left primers where water based, but the top coat was still solvent based.
The whole paint area is a "clean room", everyone is required to wear lint free overalls, hats with hairnets warn at all times. Entrance to the booth is via a corridor of air jets/vacuum that basically blows the dust off you and then sucked away. All the booths are strictly controlled as far as temp/humidity and they all have water co-agulation systems. The floors have grates and underneath flows a constant stream of water that collects any paint residue, this water is run off into huge vats where the paint residue is skimmed and collected.

Most of the paint process is now automated, door james and under hoods/trunks are still hand painted, but for the body the basecoat/clear is applied using an electrostatic charge by a PLC controlled robotic "spinning bell".
Imagine a shower head with a lot more holes, tiny holes and it spins at 30,000 + rpm. The paint is positively charged (60,000 volts)(hence all the painting gear in the booths are plastic), the car body is grounded. The paint comes out in an ultra fine mist and there is little or no over spray. The paint infact is so smooth, so evenly spread out, that on metallic cars they have a manual station between basecoat and clear to "rough up" the finish, as if they left it auto sprayed, you would never be able to panel match the car for a repair.

The paint is fed via lines from huge tanks (we would get deliveries from Behr/DuPont) in something that looked liked a gas tanker and it is all accurately measured, for example if we where painting batches of cars in red, there would be enough paint drawn into the lines for those cars, then a shot of thinner to clean the bells, then the next color.

Once out of the paint booth, the cars go into ovens...they have multiple zones and they gradually warm the body to reflow the clear and then gradually cooled to let it harden.

One thing to consider, the largest part of the paint area..was the "re work" lines, you would be amazed how many times some of these cars had the paint reworked.

Nick

gr8vet said:

Would love to see how they do it one too. From what I understand there are no windows, no peepholes, and it is a totally controlled environmental super clean room. i.e. BIG clean room! The paint line is cleaner than most operating rooms. As I understand workers are tested for excessive skin cells, hair and dandruff coming off, unbelievable, but guess that's how they produce a dust free paint job. I have been told that GM uses Dupont products, true???? Do not know.

tt

Click to expand...

Nick, you answer above was fascinating, proved some comments I had heard.....

GM stock was once owned by the Dupont family...about 25% of the company, in a neat little family corporation known as Christiana Securities, and passed on from generation to generation due to sitting on the BOD of these holding companies no one ever knows about.....well GM was buying ALL DuPont paint products, some compeitor bitched to the Feds about it, and so the famous anti trust cast against GM and DuPont was brought sometime in the early '60's....

so DuPonts/Christiana Securities was told to spin off the GM stock over a long period of time, so as to preserve value, not that it matter much TODAY, but this was some 40+ years ago....

Bet odds they out of it long since, but trick is....form another holding company, buy right back in.....:harhar: these olde tyme billionaire families own so much shit, it's amazing....I would be very surprised they don't own most of Mutsobitchy, Nissan, Toyota, etc....WE think it's Japanese, it's to look at the N. American branches we dealing with.....Toy of NA, whatever....different corp than Toy/Japan....think ALL that stock is traded on the floor??? bullshit little EVA it is....



At any rate, I called my local dizzy for Dupont paints, above, and he is just about 5 miles up the road, so now I know.....I probably do their stuff, DuPont got the chemical thing down pretty good if anyone does....

Long as it don't explode on me....

:gurney:

lvrpool32 said:

Worked in GM's paint plants in Europe (Vauxhall/Opel) for 12 years before moving to the states.

When I left primers where water based, but the top coat was still solvent based.
The whole paint area is a "clean room", everyone is required to wear lint free overalls, hats with hairnets warn at all times. Entrance to the booth is via a corridor of air jets/vacuum that basically blows the dust off you and then sucked away. All the booths are strictly controlled as far as temp/humidity and they all have water co-agulation systems. The floors have grates and underneath flows a constant stream of water that collects any paint residue, this water is run off into huge vats where the paint residue is skimmed and collected.

Most of the paint process is now automated, door james and under hoods/trunks are still hand painted, but for the body the basecoat/clear is applied using an electrostatic charge by a PLC controlled robotic "spinning bell".
Imagine a shower head with a lot more holes, tiny holes and it spins at 30,000 + rpm. The paint is positively charged (60,000 volts)(hence all the painting gear in the booths are plastic), the car body is grounded. The paint comes out in an ultra fine mist and there is little or no over spray. The paint infact is so smooth, so evenly spread out, that on metallic cars they have a manual station between basecoat and clear to "rough up" the finish, as if they left it auto sprayed, you would never be able to panel match the car for a repair.

The paint is fed via lines from huge tanks (we would get deliveries from Behr/DuPont) in something that looked liked a gas tanker and it is all accurately measured, for example if we where painting batches of cars in red, there would be enough paint drawn into the lines for those cars, then a shot of thinner to clean the bells, then the next color.

Once out of the paint booth, the cars go into ovens...they have multiple zones and they gradually warm the body to reflow the clear and then gradually cooled to let it harden.

One thing to consider, the largest part of the paint area..was the "re work" lines, you would be amazed how many times some of these cars had the paint reworked.

Nick

Click to expand...

Used to do that back in the 70's painting difficult parts like headers and motorcycle frames.
You can hook up a trickle charger to a spray gun or even a spray can and the piece and actually watch some of the spray turn around and come back to the piece.

Great information to hear from an insider, thanks!

I was wondering about the DuPont Paint use. When I went to match the Gold paint on the '82, the only paint available that can match that code is DuPont.

tt

That was an excellent answer from lvrpool32 and goes right along with a video I saw of the process used by Jeep. I will add that the bodys are dipped, baked and powder coated prior to paint.

This was shown to us at a Lesonal paint school I attended last January.

gr8tvette, sorry but I don't buy the dupont is the only paint that matches line. Of course this comes from a new Sikkens and Lesonal jobber.

Yes, the rust prevention part (ELPO process) is they take the shell from Body and Weld (basically the bare steel body) it is placed on a hanger (the body is slung below it for the ELPO process, 4 large pins actually screw into the inside of the body around the roof line and hold it in place (otherwise they float of the hanger in the dips!!), they get transferred to bottom mount "skids" for the primer/color process) It is then ran through a number of "acid" washes and cleaning dips before the whole body is emersed through a large electrostitically charged bath of paint. I will be honest I am not sure what the make up of the paint was, it was solvent based at the time, but I believe GM was trying to find a water based solution to meet clean air requirements.
The paint is baked again, before cooled, QA'd and then removed from its hanger.

Nick