Carl Izzo Consultant

Heads or Tails?

We’re experiencing a condition that’s described to me by my painter as “tails” in the spray pattern using our new painting equipment.

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To Train...or Not To Train?

Wouldn’t it be better to eliminate issues in painting and pretreatment (cross-contamination of tanks due to carryover, running tanks out of range, blocked nozzles and risers, etc.) before purchasing new equipment?

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Hard-To-Reach Corners

How can we get paint onto the difficult and inaccessible areas of cabinets while eliminating overspray on the interior compartments of drawers and cabinets?

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Painting Methods

My problem is cleaning and corrosion protection for the products we manufacture.

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Pigment to Binder Ratio Calculation

For my percent ash value the formula reads: % ash value = ((100% -% moisture of sample)/%NV) × 100. The problem I encounter is that I’m unable to figure out the percent moisture of sample. Is there a formula I’m missing?

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Stripping Coatings

I have a good background on the chemistry of solvent-containing and waterborne materials, but I will have to do some additional work on better chemical strippers for powder coatings because we find them more difficult to strip. My guess is that in addition to being thicker, possibly denser and less porous, there are some chemical differences as well. Can you steer me toward some sources of this type of information?

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Pretreatment of Aluminum

Recently, we had a job to paint several pieces that were too long to fit into our chromate conversion coating tanks, so our customer arranged with another shop to anodize them. These pieces were painted some months ago and we now find there is an adhesion problem after only three months in the field. In fact, the finish is peeling off in large sections. Can you give us some suggestions as to why we are running into adhesion problems using the anodizing pretreatment, and why you feel anodizing is preferable to a chromate conversion coating as a pretreatment? Also, is it possible that initially there may be good adhesion of the coating to the anodized surface, but later there is a reaction which causes peeling problems?

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Removing Anti-Corrosion Compound

Our problem is that the compound eventually seeps out onto the other surfaces intended to be painted after assembly. What can we do to solve this problem?

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Cement Truck Finish

We are having paint problems. These problems run from primer and paint peeling to severe rusting. Before we order any painting and metal preparation equipment, we need to know the materials to use and procedures to follow to improve our paint finish.

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Black Aluminum Finish

I want to make a cast aluminum part corrosion resistant. Can you help me with this information? Can this process be accomplished “in house” on a small scale? Can a black finish be accomplished? If so, what chemicals and processing steps must be followed?

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Painting Aluminum Castings

How many of these customary aluminum preparatory steps can we eliminate from our process? We’ve experimented with eliminating the conversion coating and primer coat without any adverse affects over the short run.

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Coating Interior Surface

We use a miniature foam roller on a metal rod to coat the inside of a 3/4 inch ID tube. It does work, but the coating is uneven, and the work is very tedious. I am curious to know if you have received any ideas from other readers that may help further.

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