I’m excited that one of our Philadelphia area shops is the first in the region to have a “gas catalytic drying” system up and running. We opened a new brownfield shop in Aston, Penn., in April, with a complete gas catalytic drying system in both the body and paint departments, and the early results are really encouraging.
If the term “gas catalytic drying” isn’t familiar to you, you’re not alone. It’s a type of product that has been in use in Europe and Australia for more than a decade, but it’s just now hitting the United States. At least three companies are selling systems here.
The equipment, which requires only standard electrical and natural gas hook-ups, uses infrared energy to rapidly cure filler, primer and paint. How fast? Think of a body tech no longer letting a car sit idle. He applies the body plastic, uses a ceiling mounted robotic unit to cure the filler in 1-3 minutes, roll-primes the area, dries it with the system, sands it and preps the car to head over to paint.
Doing some adhesive bonding? This system cut the cure time in half.
In the paint shop, the car is then mounted on rollers so that it can be rolled into the booth. Once it is sprayed, a robotic arch mounted in the booth automatically cycles across the car and back. The traditional booth cycle time of 60 to 90 minutes can be cut to 35 to 50 minutes.
Sound intriguing? Well, there are some caveats. It’s not inexpensive. As with any installation situation, there are variables but the booth arch alone can require an investment of as much as $90,000. I believe the energy savings and added throughput at the new shop will help it pay off, and I could see how it could also make sense, for example, for a maxed-out shop considering adding another booth.
In addition to the arch, we installed a ceiling-mounted “half-arch” system that allows us to move the robotic arm anywhere over six stalls in our body department. The installation of 60-feet of tracking system was a feat of engineering, with even tighter tolerances than we need to meet in bringing cars back into OEM specs. We also purchased a couple of hand-held units for small areas.
We looked at a couple brands of the equipment and I was impressed with both. One of the things I liked about the one we chose is that it comes along not just with technical training on how to use it, but also consulting and training to set up a new production process (based on the “theory of constraints”) designed to enable a continuous work flow that helps us take advantage of the speed the equipment offers. We thought the new location was an ideal place to test the concept, which takes a new approach for everything from job descriptions and pay plans to parts management and scheduling.
It clearly, therefore, requires the right type of crew. As one of my technicians told me, it takes some time to “get out of the rut” and even just get used to the equipment. But the technical aspect of it hasn’t proved to be a big hurdle.
As I write this, it’s still too early to have much to report in the way of overall results at the newly-opened shop. But our initial experience has been positive, and I’m looking forward to sharing some numbers with you in the future as we decide whether to add some of the equipment in some of our other stores, or continue to implement the complete equipment and production system in future brownfield or greenfield expansion we do.
