Is it time for waterborne?

I was invited to attend a waterborne workshop a couple of weeks ago by my friends at PROFINISHESPLUS. They were holding the workshop to show the benefits of DuPont™ Cromax®Pro waterborne basecoat. Like others I always thought of changing to waterborne was for EPA reasons, but after attending this workshop I found many other benefits, especially time!  Forget about the EPA regulations, the date for mandatory use continually moves and I believe people have put going to waterborne on the back burner.  After attending this workshop I can tell you that is a big mistake.  Going to waterborne will speed up production.  Terry McDaniel, DuPont paint technician and John Santiago PROFINISHES PLUS paint technician set up the paint both with some mock front ends and a couple loose fenders.  Manned with a stopwatch John timed the different processes and believe it or not they painted a complete front end with waterborne in the time it took to paint a fender in solvent.  With the wet-on-wet application process of the waterborne product they were able to paint the front fenders and hood on the mock frontend in just less than 15 minutes.  It took just over 15 minutes to apply a basecoat of solvent, let it flash and apply a second coat of base product.  It also took less time for the waterborne to flatten/flash so clear could be applied than the solvent. If that is not a reason to go to waterborne, I certainly do not know what is!   I encourage everybody to ask their paint jobber to show them the benefits of going to waterborne, or better yet, open your shop to a workshop.  Seeing this first hand made me realize there are many more benefits than EPA requirements.  To me EPA now stands for Extra Production Achieved! Your jobber can also help you with an audit to see what you will need to do to get ready to convert to waterborne and my article in ABRN will give you some additional insight.