Volvo Trucks’ new Umeå paintshop meets customers demands on finish

Volvo Trucks Umeå’s new topcoat paint-shop in northern Sweden is an advanced and fully automated facility that meets and even surpasses customers’ ever-higher demands on quality and finish.

At the inauguration of the new facility, Staffan Jufors, President and CEO of Volvo Trucks, said, “This is an investment that will cover several product generations and with it Volvo Trucks has taken yet another step towards increasing the quality and service life of our products.”

Volvo Trucks Umeå now has a comprehensive paint-shop of absolute world class. The new topcoat application facility is the third and final step in creating the world’s cleanest and most modern paint-shop.

Volvo Trucks bases its operations on the company’s three core values of Quality, Safety and the Environment. The cab factory in Umeå most certainly meets Volvo’s strict core value standards:

It is the world’s cleanest paint-shop as regards emissions of solvents to the air

The quality and finish are of world-leading class

Volvo’s safety cab came from Umeå

The factory will be carbon dioxide-free within a few years

It is one of the industry’s most energy-efficient plants

The three development steps

The first step in the new paint-shop was the installation of a new pre-treatment unit in 1997. The second step was taken when the primer facility was commissioned in November 2004.

“We’ve invested about a billion kronor in a complete new paint-shop in Umeå and we’ve done it to meet the demands of the future,” says Staffan Jufors.

The new topcoat process is designed to meet the highest possible internal and external environmental demands as regards solvents, noise, low energy consumption, low material consumption and so on.

“Development of the new environmentally optimised paints has taken more than four years,” says Lage Lindfors, site manager at Volvo Trucks Umeå, where the cab factory now further reinforces its position as the world leader in its field.

Superb quality

The fully automated facility makes for superb quality and finish and where Volvo Trucks can now offer customers a wide range of colours.

“We’re also aiming to expand our range of enhanced finishes such as metallic paints. In the longer term, quality will be further improved when cabs and plastic components will be able to be painted together,” reveals Lage Lindfors. “The new process has been designed specifically to handle today’s steel cabs, but we have now made it possible to paint additional components in the cab colour, such as door extension panels, front hatches and so on. This is a long-term investment which will meet our needs for several forthcoming product generations.”

The new painting process – primer and topcoat – has been designed according to a modular approach. “This makes us less vulnerable to disruptions and more flexible with regard to short-term and long-term volume changes since we can balance the production volumes per line,” explains Lage Lindfors. .

Paint application in four layers

Today’s Volvo cabs are painted in three layers. The first layer, which comes after pre-treatment, is applied in what is known as the ED (electro-dip) method. The second paint layer is the water-based primer, and the third layer is the topcoat, that is to say the colour specified by the truck purchaser. Metallic-painted cabs have one additional layer of paint – the clear lacquer – making four layers in all.

The New Topcoat project started in June 2005 and construction has been under way for almost two years.

The building itself covers 5,100 square metres and is 30 metres high. The cabs are painted using entirely automatic robot lines and are then inspected in special stations to ensure the high standards of quality and finish for which Volvo’s products are renowned.

“The project was carried out within the cost and time frames set at the start. In many cases, we even exceeded our high expectations and created a solid foundation for our continued development as the world’s cleanest and most modern paint-shop,” says Mårten Henriksson, project manager for the New Topcoat project.

Plastic components

In the future, Volvo Trucks Umeå will also paint plastic components in the new topcoat paint-shop in order to reduce the overall environmental burden.

This involves an investment of SEK 138m, which is the second step out of a total investment of SEK 650m (£ 48.2m). Volvo Trucks will thus further improve quality to meet customer demands for even better finish.

The new paint-shop offers a wider scope for applying metallic paint finishes. Metallic paints impose higher demands on colour-matching between the cab and other fitted components, so painting of the cab and add-on components at the same time is therefore essential. The topcoat project has thus generated more jobs since painting of these components has been transferred to Umeå.

The investment in the facility for painting plastic components brings about a change in both technology and logistics, with the paint-shop receiving more robots in both the primer and topcoat stations as well as an entirely new box for inspection and adjustments.

Lage Lindfors explains, “The changes are being made for reasons of quality, cost and environmental optimisation. There are considerable synergies available from painting both the cab itself and its various add-on components in one and the same process,”

He continues. “Volvo stands for quality, safety and the environment and now Volvo Trucks has a world class complete paint-shop that puts the focus on our core values.”