When an OEM or job shop begins the journey to transform their company and take on a lean mindset, they tend to start by looking at areas that appear to be the most noticeable such as dated machinery, labor intensive areas, or bottlenecks in the process.

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Let’s face it, if we’re looking for cost savings, we often think about efficiency. Time is money, as they say. We all know that powder coatings are an outstanding coating choice, delivering a gorgeous finish, technical advantages over traditional liquid paints, and an unbeatable sustainability footprint.

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Expenditures for masks and racks in a coating operation can add up. Annual expenses related to masking for coating operations can run between $5,000 for smaller shops up to—or exceeding—$50,000 at larger operations.

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The past couple of years have been uncertain and we are all dealing with many of the same issues: increased material costs, supply chain delays, labor shortages, and the list continues to grow. In 2022, a primary challenge for powder coaters is to reduce costs to become more profitable.

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Electrostatic Dissipative Coatings (ESD coatings) have been available in the marketplace for many years. Information regarding their performance may be confusing and therefore often misunderstood. We hope to clarify how these “work-surface coatings” prevent the discharge of static electricity, which when released, leads to the damage of sensitive electronic components used in the electronics industry.

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DeFelsko Corporation, a leading U.S. manufacturer of coating thickness gages and inspection instruments, is a multi-generational family-owned company that has supplied simple, durable, and accurate gages to the global coatings industry since 1965.

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PCI 3000 Certified Custom Coater and Peer Group member Westside Finishing Company (WSF) has come a long way from its humble beginnings in the early 1980s. The family-owned custom coater that started out with just a handful of employees in West Springfield, MA, has seen their staff grow more than tenfold.

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My dad, Jesus Raul Martinez Sr. (Raul), immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1950s. At that time, you could go to the U.S. Embassy and apply for a visa, which in his case took one year to receive.

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Research published by the Conway Center for Family Business states that 80 to 90% of U.S. businesses are family owned. While thirty percent of these businesses reach the second generation, only ten percent make it to the third

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The following is a guide for what to look for, how to confirm root cause, and recommendations for corrective action when troubleshoot coating defects in the field.

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