Pro Strip

Early layout concepts followed more traditional rectangular looped designs, with the washer and dry-off oven on one side and the powder booth and cure on the other. However, as the design progressed, it became clear that a conventional footprint would consume too much valuable manufacturing space.

“We started with a layout that wrapped around one bay, then two bays,” O’Sullivan said. “That’s when we really started to worry about how much floor space this one operation was going to take.”

Through collaboration between the two companies, the layout was refined into a straight-line configuration installed against a back wall in a 25-foot by 345-foot space. The return loop was then against the wall, so all equipment was compressed into one continuous path.

The system minimized its footprint while preserving open space for fabrication and material handling. Most important, it delivered the production volume needed while still being flexible enough to handle the variety of parts a job shop powder coater might want to coat.

“The straight-line design wasn’t the original goal,” O’Sullivan explained. “The design was the outcome of trying to keep as much floor space as possible for manufacturing.”

The Trimac system delivers a part from load to unload in 60 minutes, supporting a lean operation. The system design consists of the following equipment:

5-foot per minute, 4-inch I-beam monorail conveyor system (handling up to a 1,000-lb load)
four-stage pretreatment washer designed for zirconium
multi-zoned Trimac Gas-Cat dry-off oven
environmental (EV) room with 10 automatic guns and booth setup provided by Nordson Corp.
multi-zoned Gas-Cat 10-minute cure oven and a heat dissipation tunnel to deliver parts quickly to unload
The system is designed to accommodate parts up to 3-feet wide by 5-feet tall by 20-feet long.