Letter 3477

Oil used for pressed parts is incompatible with paint process. Help? 

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Dear Sir

My name is Murat Kirem and I am a Quality Engineer with an automotive drivetrain company in Cheltenham Victoria Australia. We manufacture value added pressed parts fro the Automotiv industry and supply pressed parts for Holden, Toyota, Ford and PBR Brake systems. We have recently and in the past have had numerous problems finding an oil which is compatible with our EDP process of coating our products. The oil we use for our pressings cannot be easily "washed off" our parts and are consequently causing "snot" marks on our products which is unacceptable to our customers. We do not EDP coat our products ourselves and our supplier insists that it is the oil we use and NOT his process of cleaning. Do you recommend a better oil, one that may be synthetic, we are hearing stories from the US of oils which can be used in Pressing operations and can be washed off with hot water. Could you please advise

Murat Kirem
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Murat - You bring up a couple of interesting points. The first, is that your EDP coater says it isn't his cleaning process. This is probably hogwash. He may need to investigate alternative cleaners that will remove your hard-to-clean press oils. On the press oil subject, yes there are some good synthetic press oils, but cleaning them with just water is more fiction than fact. Go back to your coater and offer to work with him in the search for better cleaning chemistry - if that doesn't work, then start looking at less tenacious pressworking fluids. Good Luck.

Dan Brewer
chemical process supplier - Gurnee, Illinois