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On 14 Jan 2003 at 20:22, John Jaranson wrote: > First, I have a book called "Volkswagen: A Week at the Factory". It is a > collection of B&W photos taken by Peter Keetman at the Wolfburg factory in > 1953. It is a very good book, BTW. Anyway, it clearly shows on page 69 > freshly painted bodies coming from the paint shop (that is what the caption > says) and the bodies are coming out in no particular order as regards color. > You can also see in many of the other shots the bodies of the beetles being > wisked about the plant on overhead conveyors. The bodies are a mix of > colors, not batched together. They still could have been painted on dedicated color lines and then merged into a single line. > I also talked with some manufacturing and paint guys at work (Ford Motor > Company). Batch processing of paint was proposed and tried several times > and was never successful. Too much inventory sitting around if the batch > sizes were big enough for it to make sense. The solution, at Ford at least, > was to have a paint kitchen separate from the spray booth. The paint > kitchen had tanks of paint that were kept full by the employees in the > kitchen. Separate lines for each color ran from the kitchen to the booth. > The painter in the booth would hook his spray gun to the appropriate line > for the color of the car that was in his booth. Spray away. When he was > done, he simply purged the gun and hooked it up to the next line for the > next color of car. This way the colors were sprayed in the same sequence as > the body and chassis builds and the trim and final assembly. Sure seems like this would waste a fair amount of paint. I assume Ford would have had quite a number of paint booths running in parallel, so they could afford to keep each booth running a single color, at least MOST of the time. I hadn't been thinking about pressure feed guns. I LIKE calling the paint source the "Kitchen." It certainly makes sense to have a central location just keeping all the paint colors mixed and flowing. -- ******************************* Jim Adney, jadney@vwtype3.org Madison, Wisconsin, USA ******************************* ------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <type3-off@vwtype3.org> For more help, see http://vwtype3.org/list/