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SHOP TALK
B y a s h l e y b r ay
The Bunting Group of Companies of Verona, PA
Streamlining the Painting Process
T
he Bunting Group of Companies (www. buntinggroup.net) includes Bunting Architectural Metals, which specializes in Kynar® coated aluminum building envelope solutions available in both custom and pre-engineered systems. Its sister company, Bunting Graphics, offers architectural signage and metal fabricated solutions. Bunting has been batch coating in standalone booths for many years, but during its peak times, the paint process was always a bottleneck for its operations. Plus Bunting had to outsource the Kynar or powder-coated finish to third parties. To deal with these two problems, Bunting decided to invest in a horizontal coating system. Bunting partnered with a company that engineered a custom-designed system for its production facility while also manufacturing the technical components. The remaining components were fabricated in-house by Bunting, which then installed the system. It took about three years from the start of the design process to getting the system up and running. “One of the many challenges of the process was realigning the existing equipment in our production facility to allow the paint system to fit,” says Ralph Stehle, senior project planner at Bunting. The system is in a corner of the shop and includes over 300 feet of overhead conveyor, a series of paint booths, and a cure oven at the end. The system can coat parts up to six feet wide-by-nine feet tall-by-thirty feet long with a maximum weight
of 2400 pounds. It’s one of the largest horizontal coating systems of its kind in North America. How many pieces are coated a day depends on the size and shape of the parts as well as the workload. “A good example would be four-foot-by-eight-foot sign cabinets of which we can coat 600 per eighthour shift.This example would equate to around 300 gallons of paint and primer per shift,” says Stehle. “We’re able to get several smaller jobs done in a day. It wouldn’t be that typical for someone to have 600 sign cabinets to be painted in one day, but between a bunch of jobs, we could hit that kind of capacity.” For signage jobs, Bunting primarily uses Matthews Paint. The shop turns to Duranar by PPG for architectural metals and powder by PPG for powder coating projects. “We are also able to coat with other brands of paints or powders when requested,” says Stehle. The system also makes it easy to switch—enabling the shop to do multiple finishes and colors a day. Bunting mixes its own paint onsite for small batches, but buys paint premixed from PPG’s distribution facility, which is local, for larger batches. Thanks to the horizontal coating system, Bunting not only eliminated its workflow bottleneck, it also opened up new profit avenues. “Instead of sending our parts to other people to be painted or powdercoated, other people are now able to send us pieces to be painted or powder-coated,” says Stehle.
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Sign Builder Illustrated // December 2015
Photos: the bunting group of companies.
A horizontal coating system solves workflow issues.
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