Every day of my 13-year professional career has been spent in the paint and coatings industry. For all of those years, however, I’ve harbored a dark secret – I hate to paint. At least 90% of the walls of my house are (sort of) decorated with the same drab, neutral-colored house paint that was there when my wife and I first moved in years ago. I’m in no hurry to change it, though, because I really hate to paint.

Okay, I suppose painting itself isn’t all that bad. But all of the prep work, cleaning, taping, spackling, primer, and everything else takes so long and makes such a mess that I can never seem to get over the hump. As a result, all of these paint-related, home-improvement projects have taken up permanent residence on my to-do list.

Whew, getting that off my chest feels pretty good! But, more importantly, let me get to the whole reason I brought this up: the Epox Z Kote line, and some of the things we’ve been doing to make that product even better.

Atlas Tube’s Epox Z Kote line of pre-coated HSS products has allowed us to take the cleaning and priming of structural steel tubes out of our customer’s processes, letting them focus on the things they’d rather be doing. Several of the things that we’ve been doing to optimize this product have come together and are arriving in the field as you read this posting. I’ve listed a few of them below:

• We’ve modified the glass transition temperature and the melt viscosity of the main binder in the coating. (We made the final painted surface smoother and more even.)
• We’ve reduced the curing temperature of coating, minimizing the carbon footprint of the application process. (We’re getting greener.)
• We’ve moved from traditional phosphate-based pretreatment to state-of-the-art zirconium-based pretreatment. (we’re making the steel more corrosion resistant before we even apply the paint.)