One of the UK’s most well known and high quality manufacturers of high gloss and flat matt doors has just taken delivery of a new installation from Schuberts connected directly to a Giardina spray machine.

Schuberts installed a new flash-off zone and gas catalytic IR drying zone to service the finishing needs of both hand sprayed products as well as wet panels coming from a fully automatic Giardina spray machine.

The customer sprays solvent based high gloss PU as well as solvent and waterbased matt paints and lacquers. With the Giardina spray machine able to run at and above 6m/min, the bottleneck was always the flash-off and curing time, not to mention issues with contamination and variation in finishing quality when the wet product was left in the open factory environment. The new Schubert installation addresses each of those issues in three key ways.

A dedicated flash-off room was designed and built around the outfeed conveyor of the Giardina automatic reciprocating spray machine, where wet product is loaded onto drying racks. The flash-off is fitted with a pressurised heated air balance system via a biomass boiler, whereby the 18c input air is matched to the air extracted. All heated incoming air is filtered to remove any particulate and the extract air is fed into the modified Schubox catalytic infra red drying system. The permanent extraction system is at low level to remove the VOC’s.

Once flash-off has happened, the racks are transferred into the dedicated custom Schubox drying zone.

This area is fitted out with 5 gas catalytic heater panels, providing heat, long wave infra red and air movement at a gentle 35-40c. A dedicated control panel serves the whole of the new installation from a central point from an easy to use touch-screen HMI.

Drying times are slashed, productivity is up, reworks are down and Schuberts have another satisfied customer!