In this video from the SABO Academy you’ll see the plant in which we paint our shock absorbers (even our SABO Rosa Award).
It has been built with the addition of some personalised features that we requested in order to optimise the painting process and make it more effective. It is a 120 metre long line with a capacity of 550 shock absorbers and an average daily output of 1300 pieces.
The paint we use is a water-based product; we mainly use a matt black colour yet can personalise the colour as per customer’s requests; for initial-installation customers we currently provide the colours Red and Yellow.
The painting process consists of a de-greasing wash + alkaline phosphatisation (phosphodegreasing), which combines preliminary cleaning to remove contaminants (such as oil, grease and dust) with the subsequent creation of a porous, crystalline, highly adhesive layer that provides excellent anchoring for subsequent adhesion of the paint; one of the secrets behind good painting, in fact, is good preparation of the surfaces to be painted! The efficiency of these key steps is verified via phosphodegreasing Ph checks.
After further washing with demineralised water the shock absorber enters a drying tunnel where it stays as long as is necessary to ensure optimisation of the process; the drying temperature is between 80 and 90 degrees. After this phase comes the actual painting. As you can see we use fixed spray guns to coat the critical coupling parts of the shock absorber, while a third mobile spray gun is used to paint the lengthways section evenly. Once painted the shock absorbers are returned to the oven so the coating can be dried. This takes between 30 and 35 minutes at a temperature of between 75 and 80 degrees.