Finishing Finesse
Posted on Saturday, October 1, 2011
Edited By Sharon Spielman
As one of Ohio’s largest powder
and ceramic coating
facilities, Aesthetic Finishers
serves the needs of commercial
clients—such as those in the automotive
and appliance industries—as
well as individual hot rod and motor
sports clients. This keeps their
80,000 sq. ft. Piqua, Ohio, facility
and its 40 employees busy each
week, coating hundreds of different
parts in more than 50 colors.
Aesthetic Finishers caters to
industries that require the highest
quality finishes. “We pride ourselves
on the reputation we’ve earned as a
Class A finisher,” explains Bill
Coomer, the facility’s owner. “Our
customers demand it. We can’t send
an Easter-egg looking stove back to
one of our appliance customers, for
example. Moreover, any color contamination
costs us money in rejects
and wasted powder. For a while, it
seemed the only way to meet the
high standards of Aesthetic
Finishers’ customers was to spray to
waste instead of reclaiming powder.”
Coomer turned to his colleagues at
Nordson Corporation, Amherst, Ohio,
for a better solution. In the process of
developing the latest in its line of
powder coating technologies,
Nordson and Coomer worked together
to devise a booth that would mini-
mize powder contamination while
accommodating a range of profiles.
The result of their collaboration
was a customized version of the
ColorMax®3 Powder Spray System.
Designed to maximize powder
usage and nearly eliminate any contamination,
the booth is constructed
of proprietary Apogee® canopy material,
which offers the least amount of
powder attraction. As a result, it
enhances color change speed, eliminates
the possibility of cross-contamination
of colors, and makes routine
booth cleaning quick and easy. Other
features that maximize powder efficiency
include:
• Open-face canopy design and external
manual touch-up stations improve
first-pass transfer efficiency with full
and easy access around part.
• Airwash that moves powder to the
extraction plenum and ensures mini-
mum powder-in-process.
• Single plenum along the center of
the booth to reduce contamination
risk.
• Access doors in cyclone and
plenum for easy cleaning.
• HDLV® (high-density powder, lowvolume
air) pumping technology continuously
returns powder back to feed
center for peak recovery efficiency.
“We were in the early stages of
developing this product when Bill
40 Powder Coated Tough
contacted us,” says Frank Mohar,
Nordson Powder Systems Specialist.
“We spent a couple of months at his
facility, working together to improve
the ‘if you can see it, then you can
clean it’ concept. His input was instrumental
in achieving our proof of concept
and color-change testing capabilities
with the system in the Nordson
customer test laboratory.”
The booth designed for Aesthetic
Finishers incorporates a specialized dual
cyclone design to maximize cleaning efficiency.
To accommodate more challenging
powders used at Aesthetic Finishers,
the cyclone’s lower section can be
unclamped and rolled out, allowing the
cyclone’s entire interior surface to be eas-
ily wiped clean from top to bottom.
While the majority of powders come
clean without this extra step, the
breakaway version for tough powders
takes “if you can see it, you can clean
it” to the “you can see it, touch it and
clean it” capability, according to Mohar.
Coomer agrees. “That’s
exactly what we have. You can physically
touch all the powder-contact
surfaces that your reclaim powder
will encounter. So, you can see contamination
and clean it before it gets
introduced into your next powder
coming through,” he notes.
Aesthetic Finishers installed the
first ColorMax3 system last October,
in a line with an 800-ft. overhead
conveyor, automatic guns, a six-stage
wash and curing ovens. The line
undergoes up to eight color changes a
day and has allowed Coomer to
exceed his goals for reclaim and quality
as well as productivity.
“I love the performance,” Coomer
says. “We can even get contamination-
free white to black. And our
actual powder cost savings are phenomenal.
We are reclaiming about 97
percent of all the powder we use in
this booth right now.”
The system also includes Nordson’s
iControl® integrated control system
with 255 programmable recipes and
Encore® and SureCoat® automatic
spray guns. The system is modular in
design to accommodate the various
work heights and the company’s ever changing
production requirements.
“Nordson has supplied all the support
I needed but never got in the
past,” says Coomer. “Nordson and
Aesthetic Finishers really came
together and listened to each other.
As a result, they improved their
product and I improved my productivity.
There are a lot of companies
out there that don’t have the man-
power—or the desire—to do that.”
For more information on Nordson
ColorMax3 system, contact Bob Allsop
at 440-985-4459 or via email at
bob.allsop@nordson.com, or visit
www.nordson.com/powder. To learn more
about services from Aesthetic Finishers,
contact Bill Coomer at 937-778-8777 or
visit www.afipowder.com.
Sharon Spielman is editor of Powder
Coated Tough magazine. She can be
reached at 847-302-2648 or via email at
sspielman@powdercoating.org.