GM project takes a new approach to paint

March 29, 2021 12:00 AM

Kaiser’s Compact Eliminator keeps stray paint particles off vehicles.

DETROIT — Leftover paint particles won't land on pickups, SUVs and vans built at General Motors' electric vehicle Factory Zero plant when robots switch from a pallet of red to blue.

Factory Zero is the first new GM plant in the U.S. to get a Kaiser Compact Eliminator, which is a technology from paint finishing supplier Gallagher-Kaiser that removes overspray. The compact eliminator helps with paint shop cleanliness. But more importantly, it ensures that paint colors do not mix. A white GMC Hummer won't have a speck of red, for example, that workers have to remove.

"It's all about getting first-time quality," Alonso De Avila Jr., GM's senior project manager for sustainable workplaces, said of the push behind the new technology. "Any time we can produce a product that's of top quality the first time around, that avoids rework, avoids waste — that's a lean manufacturing idea."

Factory Zero, formerly Detroit- Hamtramck, has been under construction since early last year after the last Chevrolet Impala rolled off its assembly line. Now the factory is preparing for a new electric vehicle lineup that includes the GMC Hummer pickup and Cruise Origin shared van.

The plant was mostly vacant early last month except for the paint shop, where GM and its contractors had installed booths and ovens and workers tested paint technology.

The plant had a couple of Hummer prototypes for painting simulations and for setting robot calibrations, De Avila said.

He said the paint shop was gutted "floor to ceiling, wall to wall, because we were producing a sedan before, and now we're producing a truck and larger vehicles. The product envelope is much bigger, so everything had to basically get redone."

Zoom in: Overhauling an old plant

Paint-shop supplier Gallagher-Kaiser Corp. has completed more than 200 projects at General Motors’ Detroit assembly plant since 1952. This time around, the plant is no longer Detroit-Hamtramck but the all-electric Factory Zero, and the contractor is prepping GM to produce the GMC Hummer pickup and the Cruise Origin, a van for ride-sharing. Shannon Watts, Gallagher-Kaiser director of construction operations, spoke with Staff Reporter Hannah Lutz.

Q: What will be different about the Factory Zero paint plant vs. the other eight GM plants you’ve worked on?

A: This is a brownfield job site with an existing building. We had to modify the process to fit into the footprint that we’re working with. We designed for the space rather than design the space around the equipment.

You use a modular-build process on your projects. What’s the benefit?

It allows us to build the equipment off-site, complete it and then ship it into the floor and set it. We can set equipment on structural steel as the building is completed. Otherwise, we would have to actually offload the oven module, set it on the floor, put it on these little skates and push it into place.

When we set it on steel, we use a crane and pick up the large 40-foot modules and set them on the steel. We can set it up in a day — that would normally take six to eight weeks.

To accommodate more modern equipment, Gallagher-Kaiser had to raise Factory Zero's roofline by 20 feet over 90,000 square feet of the paint shop, said Shannon Watts, director of construction operations. The entire paint shop is 740,000 square feet including the penthouse level, which houses air-handling equipment.

"This is a significant upgrade to a longstanding facility," Watts said. "This is all state-of-the-art, world-class equipment, and GM will really benefit from it over the long haul."

Gallagher-Kaiser has built nine major paint programs for GM, including Factory Zero. The supplier has a manufacturing campus less than 4 miles away.

Gallagher-Kaiser has a patent pending for the Kaiser Compact Eliminator that GM is adopting. It is referred to as a wet eliminator, different from traditional dry eliminators, Watts said. GM also installed the technology at its Wentzville assembly plant in Missouri.

The eliminator removes paint particles from the air by mixing the air stream from the spray booth with water.

"When you bring air and water together, you want to impact the paint onto the water and let the water carry the paint particles away to the sludge system," he said. "The removal efficiency of this particular equipment is as high as anything we've ever seen."