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Valspar is a festival of colours from the moment you enter the training centre and colour lab. The chairs look like a colour chart, the doors are painted with different automotive colours, even the coffee cups are in Valspar colours with plenty of  corporate orange (PMS 152 to be precise) – because HQ is all about precision, all about colour and all about quality.

The relatively new (2014) training centre houses two large prep areas and a state-of-the-art mixing room. There are colour training rooms and a colourful café with the aforementioned cups.

The magic begins in the colour lab where a new sample from an OEM or other source comes in and the men in white coats have to begin the formulation. They start by looking under the microscope to see the physical make up of the paint. Pigments have their own shapes – Xirallics have a jagged outline while metalics are rounder. The chemists then use the spectrophotometer but it’s not all left to machines as they will match by eye as well. Then they dive intothe database to see the nearest formulation they have for this colour and get it to the mixing room. Sometimes they will have a hole-in-one moment and get it the first time but it can take up to eight attempts to get the colour right.

The car manufacturers like to keep this crew on their toes and certainly don’t make colour formulation an easy task. To see what they are up against the colour lab laid many samples of one colour from one car. A Kia had 13 different shades in the same colour but there can be up to 50 different shades as different factories and different operators within one factory don’t replicate the colour exactly. A good painter can colour correct and blend up to a point and it’s the job of the colour chemists to decide where they have to make a variation of a colour to help the painters out.

The clever Metameric light box has two colour cards side by side where they can be looked at in daylight (seem to match beautifully) by car park lighting (way off) and by afternoon sun (also not great). Our guide explained that this is one of the reasons you must stick to the formulations. Even a drop of a colour not mandated in the formulation and you can have a horrible mismatch in non-daylight conditions.

Walking across the road to the R&D centre (also no photos allowed) the tour group was introduced to the many weird looking but expensive bits of testing equipment. There is a tank for a water immersion test, a freezer, a climate cabin which creates different weather and humidity conditions from – 20 up to 300ºC and humidity cabinets as well as banks of ovens to ‘age’ the paint. Mill can measure how fine the pigment and mill beads are. There’s a dedicated spray booth for R&D.

Naturally there’s a colour mixing colour department and then a department to improve the production process as well as the auxiliary group that concentrates on everything that isn’t colours – clears, primers etc. Then there’s light industrial team.

The lab is obsessively rigorous about testing the paint in every conceivable condition. They test for edge corrosion and, of course, stone chips. How does the paint behave during a crash? Does it crack? Exhaustive tests are carried out to see how the paint behaves during application – its viscosity and when it starts to dry and when it won’t dry. There are also tests for sheer rate and the viscosity profile. There is a strange looking pendulum device which measure paint hardness and a machine to measure flexibility to see when the paint will crack.

Valspar has built a scale version of the production so they can simulate those conditions as closely as possible before it goes into production.

Our last port of call was the factory itself. The first part was a little Willie Wonka-esque with masses of different coloured  pipes weaving around the factory. Each colour has its own tank as it would be near impossible to clean out the tanks and pipes for a colour change. We’re surrounded by massive vats which hold up to 1,300 litres of liquid. We peer into the dispersion machines which grind pigments and then mix them with binders. How far you grind the pigment will determine the  colour and shade. From a red pigment you can achieve red, yellow and orange but it you grind it too much it won’t be the right tone. Valspar keeps a batch of every paint it makes so if there are any complaints they can grab the batch and test to see if there is some problem with the formulation. Nine times out of 10 it will be the application which is at fault. Waterborne paint is produced on demand here as it has a short shelf life and is sensitive to extreme temperatures.

We all enjoyed watching the robotic packing machines which assembled the boxes, lifted the paint into them and sealed them up. Valspar is very proud of its health and safety record, an accident in a place so filled with chemicals could be catastrophic. It was slightly intimidating to stand in the factory area where the most combustible materials are stored and to learn that, in the event of a fire, all the exits would close – regardless of who might still be inside – and the whole area would instantly be flooded with foam to extinguish the fire and prevent an explosion. Not a bad idea for a scene in the next Bond movie – get out of that 007.

Valspar is currently building a new colour laboratory and quietly expanding its HQ to match the expansion in market share around the globe. The pending acquisition by U.S. paint giant Sherwin-Williams will only support Valspar’s growth and the team in Lelystad show a great deal of pride in their product and confidence in a future as bright as their latest success – metallic bright red toner.

This article was published in Paint & Panel Nov / Dec 2016.
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