Coat everything in one plant

A contract coater is expanding and chooses a coating plant for the new site that offers the highest possible flexibility thanks to its modular design. The wastewater achieves a very high purity value thanks to the evaporator and ion exchanger.

The contract coating company Limbacher Oberflächenveredelung GmbH (LOV) offers its customers the entire range of metal, plastic and wood coatings. The Saxon company was founded in 1998 and now employs 63 people working in three shifts. The team led by Managing Director Uwe Jentsch is committed to high coating quality and is a GSB Master member. The GSB is a quality association for surface finishing. It ensures the quality of coatings using powder and liquid paint for components made of aluminum, steel and galvanized steel for architectural applications and for industry.

Because the capacities of Limbacher Oberflächenveredelung at the Limbach site were increasingly reaching their limits and orders had to be turned down time and again, Managing Director Uwe Jentsch looked for an external possibility for expansion. This was found in the form of a vacant industrial hall at the company Schwalbe Metallbau from nearby Mülsen. Schwalbe Metallbau is a close business partner of the Limbach-based surface finisher from a local manufacturing network in which several Saxon companies pool their know-how and jointly implement industrial projects in areas including mechanical engineering, rail and special vehicle construction, and medical technology. Schwalbe and LOV not only work closely together in the network: "We generate around one fifth of our annual sales with Schwalbe," explains LOV quality manager Jörg Seiche. In this respect, intensifying the cooperation at a joint location was of great, mutual interest.

But what should the coating plant for the new site look like? "We considered what technology we would need in the long term in order to meet our clientele's wishes even better. And how we can win new customer groups with unique selling points. We then very quickly came to the conclusion that our ideas could best be implemented with the modular design of the Jumbo-Coat systems," explains Jentsch. "We have already successfully implemented in a previous project as a team with Meeh and are always happy to benefit from this enormous competence of the entire staff, but above all from the Managing Director Ulrich Meeh."

For Jörg Seiche, the great reliability of the plant manufacturer also plays an important role: "When we rebuilt our wet paint shop in 2017, we had a time window of exactly four weeks and not a day more; our coating was outsourced to another company at short notice. The Meeh company had promised us completion, including handover, for December 20 - and that's exactly how it went: Four days before Christmas, everything was completed and the plant could go into operation. And, by the way, the quality was right, as always."

The LOV team then defined various priorities for the plant technology at the new production site. One of these was that the quality standard should be equally guaranteed at both locations. The redundancy between the two plants should be as high as possible, because if there should ever be a failure, it must be possible to continue seamlessly at the other location. For future orders, flexibility in processing small, medium and large orders should be increased. In order to continue to have unique selling points compared to regional competitors, the system was to cover the widest possible range in terms of coating windows, part weights and part geometry. In addition, it was to be possible to carry out manual and automatic coating in parallel as an option. Last but not least, the new system had to be environmentally friendly and conserve resources.

LOV's surface experts visited various Meeh plants in the surrounding area. "There are many Jumbo Coat models here, but each one is unique in its own way and always tailored to the customer's specific requirements. They have a fairly simple design, but the details are right," praises Seiche. Company founder and managing director Ulrich Meeh had a lot of fun with the project and especially working with the Limbach-based surface finisher: "LOV challenges me in a special way - I like that. We were a really good team."

Increasing the coating window

Finally, in February 2020, the decision was made to go with the modular Jumbo Coat technology, which increased the coating window to 10,000 x 3000 x 3000 mm (L x W x H) and the part weight to 2 tons. The Jumbo-Coat system includes a powder spray booth for large parts with a floor exhaust and an automated powder spray booth. The dual powder booth system allows both automated powder coating for flat parts and manual coating for complex part geometries. For drying, there is both an indirect gas-heated powder dryer and an adhesive water dryer, which for redundancy reasons is identical in design to the powder dryer. The workpieces are pretreated in a stainless steel washing booth - either automatically or manually.

Recovery of deionized water with evaporator and ion exchanger

Thanks to its low-carryover design, the washing booth allows separate pretreatment of aluminum and steel. Up to ten processes can be carried out here, from rinsing to passivation. Because carryover is otherwise always an issue with chamber pretreatments, Jentsch and Seiche opted for cascade control of the pretreatment chemistry, in which the baths fill up automatically over several basins. As a supplier, LOV relies on the company Nabu, which already supplies the headquarters in Limbach-Oberfrohna. "For us, this means simpler warehousing, and in addition, the employees already know the chemistry very well. Quality assurance for both sites runs centrally in Limbach," says Seiche.

All process wastewater is reprocessed into pure deionized water using evaporators and ion exchangers from the manufacturer Hartmann. The separated dirt concentrate is disposed of via environmental services. "This means that our coating processes are not only completely wastewater-free, but we also always have enough water available for the final rinse in top quality. VE water quality is ten to 15 micro-Siemens," explains the quality manager.

The plant is loaded and unloaded via a manual transfer car with three electric traversing platforms and two lifting/lowering stations. An evaporator system from the Hartmann company completes the plant. Construction of the plant began in April 2020 in compliance with all safety and clearance precautions. Before that, however, the former warehouse first had to undergo a complete refurbishment. Among other things, it was given a new hall floor, office fittings and a visually appealing, thermally insulated outer facade. All plant-related media were newly installed. Despite Corona with all its special features, the plant was completed without any delays. Thanks to its modular concept, it can grow at any time, thus enabling even more process variants. Further components can be added on request. The plant is also resistant to unplanned fluctuations in orders and personnel. fluctuations in personnel. In an emergency, it can be operated by just two employees.

Meeh Powder Coating and Dust Filter Systems GmbH
www.jumbo-coat.de

LOV GmbH
www.lov.de