One of my favorite aspects of the coil coating business is that my job makes life easier for so many other individuals. When plant managers or engineers first start thinking about converting to prepainted metal, they usually don’t realize all the benefits they will enjoy, and how much of a burden they will be removing from their plant and their minds. Often they are thinking about prepaint because they are concerned about needing additional space on the factory floor or enhancing the quality of their finishes, or they may have a new product line and just not enough plant capacity for additional in-house painting. However, once they start getting into the details of the conversion process, they often start to see more possibilities.
A Streamlined Process
When you outsource your product painting to a coil coater before it’s formed, you are streamlining your processes significantly. When prepainted metal is introduced, the factory often begins running in a continuous workflow rather than in a batch processing method. This change occurs because time-consuming steps such as cleaning, priming, painting and curing steps - steps that often cause production backups and delays - are eliminated from the plant. With prepainted metal, the plant becomes more predictable.In addition, environmental compliance issues and the associated paperwork and reporting requirements are reduced substantially when paint and coatings are moved out of the factory. Paint and coatings are some of the most regulated areas in manufacturing due to their flammability, potential exposure health risks to employees, and release of volatile organic compounds into the environment. By converting to prepaint, the coil coater now is the one responsible for cleanup, meeting new environmental requirements and reporting to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Coil coating is without question the most efficient coating process available today. Rather than painting piece by piece at your plant, the metal is cleaned, primed and painted in a continuous coil-to-coil process in the exact colors, textures and effects desired. Because of this, surface quality concerns are also reduced with coil coated metal. When paint is applied on the coil, it is more evenly distributed from edge to edge and is tightly adhered to the metal. A coil coated surface is also cleaned and treated more thoroughly, since the substrate is treated in its flat state, resulting in a higher-quality finish and a more consistent product.
