Every household painter knows prepping and priming is one of the toughest parts of the job. Painting vehicles isn’t much different.
Vehicle bodies must go through extensive cleaning and pretreatment stages before they are ready for the paint booth, and that process is expensive, time-consuming and energy intensive.
One of the first metal pretreatment steps is the so-called phosphate dip, where vehicle bodies are immersed in a chemical bath of zinc phosphate that acts as a primer coat for the metal surfaces.
This operation has existed in automotive paint shops for about 60 years and largely has gone unchanged since the 1980s, says Dan Wohletz, vice president-automotive North America for Henkel Corp.
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