If you are hanging parts on a rack to achieve your coatings, are you keeping a clean rack? Clean racks play a crucial role in maintaining the efficiency and quality of a paint line. Here are some key reasons why clean racks are important:
- Coating quality: A clean rack help ensure a high-quality finish on the painted parts. Any dirt, debris, or residual coatings on the racks can transfer to the parts during the painting process, resulting in defects like particles, streaks, or uneven coatings. Keeping the racks clean minimizes the risk of contamination, leading to consistent and defect-free coatings.
- Adhesion and bonding: Properly cleaned racks promote better adhesion and bonding of the coating to the parts. When the racks are free from dirt, oils, or old coatings, the parts can make optimal contact with the rack surface, allowing for improved adhesion. This helps prevent issues like peeling, flaking, or poor coating durability.
- Reduced rework and rejects: Using clean racks reduces the likelihood of rework or rejects in the painting process. If contaminated racks are used, the parts may need to be recoated or scrapped, resulting in wasted time, materials, and resources. Clean racks help minimize the chances of defects, saving costs associated with rework and improving overall production efficiency.
- Consistency and repeatability: Clean racks contribute to consistent and repeatable painting results. When the racks are clean and free from residual coatings, the same rack can be used for multiple batches of parts without introducing variations or inconsistencies in the coating process. This ensures uniformity in the finished products and helps meet quality standards consistently.
- Maintenance and equipment longevity: Regular cleaning of racks helps extend their lifespan and minimizes the need for repairs or replacements. Accumulated coatings or contaminants on the racks can degrade their structural integrity, leading to damage or malfunctioning. Keeping the racks clean reduces wear and tear, allowing them to function optimally and reducing maintenance costs.
- Worker safety and hygiene: Clean racks contribute to a safer and healthier work environment. Coating residues or contaminants on racks can become airborne during painting operations, posing inhalation risks for workers. Additionally, clean racks help maintain cleanliness in the paint line area, reducing slip and trip hazards and promoting a tidy workplace.
Overall, clean racks are essential for achieving consistent coating quality, improving adhesion, minimizing rework, and ensuring efficient and safe operations in a paint line. Regular cleaning and maintenance of racks should be part of standard operating procedures to optimize coating processes and achieve desired results.
Rack cleaning can be labor intensive depending on the method you are using. Let’s look at what an automated process can do.
Shot blasting is a surface preparation technique that involves forcefully propelling abrasive materials, such as steel shot or grit, at high speeds onto a surface. When it comes to coatings, shot blasting offers several benefits:
- Surface cleaning and preparation: Shot blasting efficiently removes existing coatings, corrosion, rust, scale, dirt, and other contaminants from the surface. It creates a clean and properly prepared substrate, ensuring better adhesion of the new coating.
- Coating adhesion: Shot blasting creates a roughened surface profile with increased surface area. This profile enhances the mechanical bonding of the coating material to the substrate. The improved adhesion helps prevent coating failures such as peeling, blistering, or delamination.
- Coating longevity: Proper surface preparation through shot blasting can significantly extend the lifespan of coatings. By removing impurities and creating an ideal surface for adhesion, shot blasting helps coatings withstand environmental factors, such as moisture, chemicals, and abrasion, thereby improving their durability and longevity.
- Coating uniformity: Shot blasting creates a consistent and uniform surface texture across the substrate. This uniformity ensures that the subsequent coating is applied evenly, avoiding inconsistencies and variations in thickness that can lead to coating failures or aesthetic issues.
- Surface profiling: Shot blasting can be adjusted to achieve specific surface profiles based on the required coating system. Coating manufacturers often provide guidelines on the desired surface roughness or profile, which can be achieved through proper shot-blasting techniques. The appropriate surface profile promotes optimal coating adhesion and performance.
- Cost-effectiveness: Shot blasting is generally a cost-effective surface preparation method when compared to alternative methods such as chemical stripping, manual abrasion or burning. As well as faster! It can be performed efficiently and quickly, reducing labor costs and downtime during coating application.
In a changing world where it is increasingly becoming harder to find labor, especially labor to suit up in heavy wear blasting in a hot booth all day, or run an oven process, and working with toxic chemicals. Automated shot blasting is a great go-to, manufacturers see quick ROIs when investing in the right shot-blasting equipment.
With a shot blasting process specifically designed for you, you can clean racks inline, reducing your handling and keeping the process at the same pace as your paint and coating line. No downtime, no transferring racks, and better improved quality.
The rack in the pictures was designed to be cleaned at 30′ a min on an inline pass-through system for an ECoat line. Let’s talk about your rack-cleaning needs!
Melissa Gibson (Palmer)
East Coast Sales
