HISTORY
CLARK™ Material Handling Company is headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky and has manufacturing sites in the states of Kentucky and Alabama; as well as in Germany, Canada and South Korea. CLARK invented the first material handling truck in 1917. Today it manufactures and markets an extensive line of electric and internal combustion forklifts, narrow-aisle lift trucks, stackers, order pickers and pallet trucks. Currently, there are over 250,000 CLARK lift trucks operating in North America and 350,000 units operating world-wide.

Problem
CLARK wanted to move to a higher solids material in their equipment finishing process. Converting to a higher solids material would increase the level of finish quality and shorten dry time, allowing them to increase their production rates. In addition, VOCs would be lowered allowing higher production levels without exceeding the maximum air quality levels established by the EPA.

Using higher solids materials required a move from using pressure pots and hot potting of two-component materials to automated mixing of two-component materials. Originally the company used single component solventborne material with small quantities of long pot life two-component material. The quality of the single component material was below the standards of the finishes used by the competition, which were moving to two-component finishes.

Graco Solution
Five years ago, the move to higher solids material generated the need for CLARK to use Graco Hydra-Cats at all booth locations. The initial solution involved 10:1 Presidents in the paint mix room with medium pressure Hydra-Cats at the booth for dedicated colors. They also implemented the modification of the paint mix room to circulating loops from booth side containers.

Customer
CLARK™ Material Handling Company Application Painting forklifts and other material handling equipment Objective They needed a reliable, accurate plural component proportioner. Solution Graco PrecisionMix® Proportioner Results Finish quality has improved and production has increased; maintenance has been simplified.

Two years ago, CLARK began upgrading their Hydra-Cats with Graco's PrecisionMix® units. They added a PrecisionMix unit for the two-component urethane topcoats while using the existing Hydra-Cat for the primer. Previous tests had been done with a competitor's two-component system with poor results before trying Graco's PrecisionMix system. The PrecisionMix system worked flawlessly during the trials. Graco's system was chosen based on successful plant trials with Valspar and Graco's high quality technical assistance using a demo unit. Recently CLARK purchased additional PrecisionMix units.

Benefits
Finish quality is the main improvement of the PrecisionMix system. In addition, the new system has simplified maintenance and pump repair, improved quality control and offers ratio assurance not typically available with mechanical proportioning systems. CLARK has also seen a 20% increase in production. They will continue to upgrade the Hydra-Cat systems with PrecisionMix units one booth at a time until all are replaced. •

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©1998 Graco Inc. Form 320-290 Rev. A 12/98 Printed in the USA