One Paint Spray Gun Modification, 25% Productivity Increase
A few months ago, Larry Allen, Spray Finisher here at Cincinnati Incorporated, noticed our spray texturing process was not as consistent and quick as it could be. As a result, he decided to refine the process to make it less time consuming and costly. He did all this with no direction from management; this was just pure initiative. Today, we’re going to tell you how he did it.
But first, a bit about Larry.
Man of many talents
Larry spent his first professional decade at a glass company, then got hired at Seagram’s whiskey. He was there for 22 years until his plant closed. After more construction jobs than he could count, he wound up at CI in the fab shop.
Larry transitioned from fabrication to the paint department, where he prepped and finish coated Machines in the final assembly process. All told, he’s been with CI for nearly a decade. In his time as a painter, he began to notice the processes that were functioning smoothly, as well as the ones that were in need of improvement. That’s when he saw how much better the paint spray guns could be.
An impossible task?
When Tony Briner, Operations Manager at CI, started talking with Larry about the spray guns, he was skeptical at first. “Tony told me nobody seems to think this improvement is possible,” Larry said. “I told him it was.”
“Larry really devoted the time and effort that was needed to modify the guns correctly,” Tony said. “He made sure to document modifications and the results so that we could use the new specs to modify our remaining spray guns.”
“It was definitely a challenge,” said Larry. “I try to leave work at work, but I sometimes think about things that pertain to my job when I’m at home. This spray gun project was one of those things. Sometimes you have to sleep on it, or find that quiet spot. When you do, I think you often find the answer was so simple that you were just thinking over the top of it.”
How the spray guns were modified, and how they perform now
On every spray gun, you have a needle and a tip. The needle goes inside the tip, and if you change the shape and diameter of the tip, you achieve a different spray pattern. To modify the spray guns, Larry exclusively used tools that were already available to him. He had a pencil grinder tool and whittled on the first gun by hand to get it where he needed it to be.
“We needed a spray pattern that we couldn’t find anywhere. It didn’t exist yet,” Tony said. “But with Larry’s knowledge of paint in general, he could modify the shape of the tip in ways that made sense for us. Instead of being a straight-through hole, it’s now conical.”
Larry is modest about most things in life, and the spray gun modifications were no exception. He’ll tell you that all he did was reverse the osmosis, making a funnel shape instead of a straight one. But really, he devised and engineered a process that no one else had thought of, a process that has had a significant impact on quality and delivery. It’s a huge change, and we could not be happier to have the new process in place.
Do you have a project in mind that could use some tough-as-nails American machine tools? Talk to us about press brakes, laser cutters, automation systems, additive machines and more.
