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.”
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.”