New paintshop for tractors
The Valtra factory in Suolahti, Finland will become more flexible and sustainable than ever before with the addition of a new state-of-the-art paint shop. Detailed plans are currently in development and the new paint shop will start operations in 2022. The new paint shop allows a more flexible operation combined with an increased production capacity.
The new paint shop will be located in a 1,500 square meter building extension, to be constructed next to the assembly factory. ”We’re building a fully new, automatised paint shop which will complement our current requirements for volume and accommodate the increased frames of the tractors. The new paint shop will allow us to make use of tried and tested technologies. For example, we have used robotized painting for decades and we were world first to use a virtual 3D environment for programming painting robots. The coating process entails the automatized wash and pretreatment, the robotic painting itself, and finally drying.
In the new painting process, a base and surface coat of the grey paint is sprayed in a separate painting chamber. The functional properties of the coating are improved by the vaporization carried out in between coats of paint,” says Mikko Torvelainen who is in charge of the project. The new paint shop will not only make the Suolahti factory more flexible and enable the manufacture of larger machines – and more machines – than before. The paint shop will further improve the factory’s energy efficiency and safety, including fire safety. Production at the Suolahti factory will continue as normal during the construction phase. Foundations will be laid in summer 2021, with the new paint shop due to start operating in August 2022.
Further information: www.valtra.com