Office equipment maker boosts burn-offcapabilities to improve its powder finish

As powder builds up and some employees leave, a manufacturer salvages and streamlines its powder

coating process with a larger, more efficient burn-off oven than its existing unit.

Steve Foley Senior Editor

lathe with a bar feeder that makessome of the roller shafts for paperfolders. Employees also heat-treatcutter blades and paper slitters inhouse.

“And with the exception of somevery large parts, we powder coat allof our own parts,” said Tyler Bear,plant manager. “About 90 percent ofour metal parts are powder-coated.The remainders are anodized orblack oxide.” The company switched

to powder coating 10 years ago. Pre-viously, the company applied liquidcoatings. A number of factors drovethe conversion, including safety andhealth concerns associated with liq-uid coatings and the durability ofpowder coating.

Martin Yale’s powder coating lineuses an overhead chain conveyor.The three-stage pretreatment sys-tem starts with a phosphate washand finishes with a fresh water

Reprinted from POWDER COATING, September 2008 www.pcoating.com

Case History

Office managers and administra-tive personnel rejoice for thepower of powder coating as

they punch, clip, and snip files withartistic aplomb. As the years inch byin temporal increments of 8-hourworkdays and 40-hour workweeks,reams of paper get stapled and col-lated, miles and miles of sensitivedocuments must be shredded, andsnail mail must be sent to seal thedeals. And where appearances muststand up, office equipment and sup-plies must shine while withstandingcontinuous, and often abusive, use. Tohelp businesses put their best faceforward, Martin Yale Industries,Wabash, Ind., coats its line of officemachines and equipment with pow-der coating. Powder sticks. But thereis a downside to powder’s amazingadhesion—how to remove powderbuildup from hooks and racks tomaintain ground and achieve thedesired finish. This was the burningquestion Martin Yale Industries hadto answer.

Martin Yale makes a variety of officemachines and equipment, includingdocument shredders, letter folders,envelope openers, business card slit-ters, check signers, and paper jog-gers. Within the company’s 140,000-square-foot-plant, workers fabricateall metal parts with high-tech equip-ment, such as a turret punch pressand a computer numerically con-trolled (CNC) six-axis, dual spindle

The hybrid radianttube burn-off ovenoperates at 93 percentefficiency andprovides uniformheating to ±10°F,eliminating hot or coldspots.

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rinse. All parts then proceed througha dry-off oven. Next, parts enter anenvironmentally controlled coatingarea. Line operators apply powderwith a Nordson modular coating sys-tem including a Sure Coat controllerand Versa Spray II automatic guns. Inaddition to three standard colors,Martin Yale offers its customers cus-tom colors and textures that operatorsapply in a spray-to-waste booth. “Wedo a lot of custom catalog racks forspecialty motorcycle and automotiveparts suppliers,” Bear said. Finally, allcoated parts move through a curingoven before cooling and unloading.

Accumulating powder plaguesprocessing

Martin Yale had installed a sound line.However, employee turnover jeopar-dized its coating knowledge base. Inthe shuffling of employees, the needfor maintaining ground by eliminatingcoating buildup became stripped fromthe company’s collective conscience.“Through attrition, a lot of knowledgecan be lost,” Bear said. “The impor-tance of proper part grounding wasnot understood by some of our currentoperators. When we started experienc-ing poor paint quality, such as insuffi-cient and inconsistent coverage, thefundamentals of the process were

revisited. The root cause of the prob-lem was found to be in the buildup ofpowder on our hooks and racks.”

As a result, inconsistent groundinghindered production throughput anddiminished coating and product qual-ity. The company started to experi-ence greater than normal amounts ofscrap from assembly and productiv-ity started to fall. “When you haveinconsistent paint, you have peoplelooking at and sorting parts that theyshould be putting on a machine,”Bear said. “In addition, you lose pro-ductivity on your paint line becauseyou have to repaint these parts. It is alose-lose situation.”

Martin Yale had installed a sound line. However, employeeturnover jeopardized its coating knowledge base. In the shuffling

of employees, the need for maintaining ground by eliminatingcoating buildup became stripped from the company’s collectiveconscience. “Through attrition, a lot of knowledge can be lost,”said the company’s plant manager. “The importance of proper

part grounding was not understood by some of our currentoperators. When we started experiencing poor paint quality, suchas insufficient and inconsistent coverage, the fundamentals of theprocess were revisited. The root cause of the problem was found

to be in the buildup of powder on our hooks and racks.”

To combat powder coatings buildupon hooks and hanging fixtures, thecompany used a burn-off oven. How-ever, it was too small, limiting theamount of hooks and racks thatcould be processed per cycle. In addi-tion, the oven had hot and cool spots.Consequently, hook-and-rack clean-ing was very inconsistent.

Searching for a better stripper

The company considered other meth-ods to strip its fixtures, such as send-ing all hooks and racks out for chem-ical processing. This option wasn’tviable because of significant freightexpenses. Outsourcing stripping alsoentailed slow turn-around times. Tokeep parts running through the coat-ing line, Martin Yale would have hadto buy more hooks and racks to com-pensate for the off-site chemicalstripping. Bear also considered con-tracting the burn-off process, but theexpense of this type of outsourcingwas also prohibitive.

With outsourcing posing too large anexpense and an existing burn-off oventoo small to handle current productionvolume, Martin Yale needed an in-house solution that was less costlythan contracting out for coating strip-ping, yet large enough not to hinder

the company’s output. To findthis solution, Bear delved intohis past work experience. Beforejoining Martin Yale, Bear workedfor a company that producedelectrical transformers and coils.The transformers were placedon racks and dipped in a var-nish for electrical insulation

The burn–off oven’s tighttemperature control lets MartinYale strip thin sheet steel andaluminum.

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and thermal conductivity.These racks would build up an accu-mulation of varnish, and workersoccasionally soaked the racks in meth-ylene chloride to break it up.

In looking for an alternative to chem-ical removal, that company turned toACE Equipment (Armature CoilEquipment), Cleveland, for a burn-offoven to remove the varnish fromracks. “The oven was reliable withlow maintenance and worked great,”Bear said. “When I started workingfor Martin Yale and saw the oven thatwas being used and the problemsthat we had with it, I said ‘We need

an ACE oven.’” Mar-tin Yale needed thenew oven to be deliv-ered quickly to mini-mize disruption topro duc tion. ACEshipped the oven inless than 6 weeksfrom the time Mar-tin Yale submitted

its pur chaseorder.

The hybridradi ant tubeburn-off ovenoperates at93 percentefficiency and

provides uniform heating to ±10°F,eliminating hot or cold spots. The effi-cient burn-off system reduces naturalgas consumption. The unit’s one-touch control system simplifies partsprocessing. After touching the button,the unit will detect the load, deter-mine the time needed to strip coat-ings, and automatically shut downwithout programming or operatorinput. The oven combines infraredenergy and radiant heat, and meetsFactory Mutual engineering stan-dards. The burn-off oven is alsoequipped with the status displayoption, which indicates more than

100 different combustion systemfaults. This feature allows mainte-nance to easily troubleshoot anyproblem that may occur.

Racking up rewardsThe addition of the larger, more effi-cient burn-off oven immediatelyimpacted operations at Martin Yale.The company increased its cleaningcapacity. Workers no longer wastetime sorting and recoating partsbecause of poor grounding. Further-more, the company now has thecapability to remove coatings fromlarger parts as needed. “Our hooks,racks, and parts actually come outclean,” Bear said. “Productivity hasincreased all the way around.” PC

Editor’s note

For further reading on the topics dis-cussed in this article, see PowderCoating magazine’s Web site at[www.pcoating.com]. Click on ArticleIndex and search by subject cate-gory. Have a question? Click onProblem solving to submit one.

Burn-off oven: ACE Equipment,Cleve land. 216/267-6366.www.armaturecoil.com

Martin Yale Industriesmanufactures and powder coatsa host of office products andequipment.

Celebrating 90 years in 2009!

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