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> >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. Another point against dedicated color booths is the "take rate" for each color. For example in 1968 the Type 3 was available in 9 different colors according to Dave Hall's website. L41 Black L633 VW Blue L650 Granada Red L50B Diamond Blue L50F Regatta Blue L60B Peru Green L66B Deep Sea Green L282 Lotus White L620 Savanna Beige If you look at data for the most popular colors for cars you, get a range from around 15-20% for the most popular color to around for 5% for the 10th most popular color. In 2001, the most popular color was silver with 25% and the 10th most popular was Bright Red with only 3%. See: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0855652.html for more data. With 235,000 or so Type 3 built in 1968, lets make a few assumptions. Black and white each got 20% of the market. They have historically been very popular colors. Dark Blue and Dark Green and Beige each got 10% and the remaining 4 colors each got 5% of the market. For those last four colors you are only looking at a bit over 11,000 cars a year. You could never justify the investment cost of a dedicated paint both for that few cars. Even if you threw in 5% of the 1,000,000 or so beetles made in 1968, you are only talking about 61,000 cars a year. That works out to on the order of 10 jobs an hour if running 3 shifts. I would expect that they are running at least twice that. We run something like 40-45 jobs an hour today. No way could they justify a dedicated paint booth for a color if it was only getting 50% utilization. As for the waste of paint, The hose disconnects from the gun and only the tiny bit in the gun head itself gets purged. This is probably less than they lost in overspray in the old days. I suspect too that frequent color changes and the necessary purges also ensured that the operator cleaned the gun regularly. If you are always spraying the same color, you would be far less likely to clean the gun regularly, probably not until it actually clogs up and stops working . <G> Later, John Jaranson '71 FI AT Fasty (Jane - Darkside Project) '66 Square (Sophy - Daily Driver) About Half a Late Square (Organ Donor) http://mywebpages.comcast.net/jaransonT3/jaransonT3/ http://mywebpages.comcast.net/jaransonT3/notavwclub/ ------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <type3-off@vwtype3.org> For more help, see http://vwtype3.org/list/