New Lordstown paint shop won't be ready until 2005

The last piece of the Lordstown renovation will bring new painting technology.
By DON SHILLING
VINDICATOR BUSINESS EDITOR
LORDSTOWN -- General Motors is spending many millions of dollars on a new paint shop in Lordstown, yet the first Chevrolet Cobalts will be painted the same way the Cavalier was.
The new painting equipment won't be ready until next year because of the time needed to build the massive addition to house it.
That doesn't bother Mike Hritz, paint superintendent at the plant. From the beginning, plans called for the 560,000-square-foot paint shop to take longer than other plant renovations.
Hritz said the paint jobs on the first Cobalts will look as good as those made a year from now.
He said the paint shop crew works hard to ensure quality in the finish on the cars even though they are working in the oldest paint shop in GM.
"This is a great finish," he said recently showing off a car in the paint shop.
In a brightly lit inspection area, workers carefully go over each car looking for any paint defects. Any that are found are buffed out and repainted.
Even with the current equipment, the defect rates are low, he said.
Still, Hritz is looking forward to moving over to the new shop.
New technology
The new equipment in the shop will bring new technology that will improve the paint and the painting process, he said.
A different type of coating will make the paint on future Cobalts more durable and chip resistant, he said. Also, the primer will come in different colors so that it can be matched to the finish coat. The colored primer is designed to make any paint chips that occur in future years less noticeable.
Also, the design of the line in the paint shop will provide more flexibility to operations, Hritz said. The setup will allow cars to be pulled out of sequence if they need repaired, which will increase the efficiency of the shop, he said.
The design of the new shop also will improve efficiency because it will be on one level, instead of multiple levels as it is now, he said.
In other parts of the assembly plant, new equipment was added by squeezing some operations here and there and filling in some areas that were used in the past for train loading, said Walt Rokicki, product launch manager.
The paint shop, however, required an addition because it was too big to squeeze into the plant, he said.
Production in the new shop is to begin slowly next summer, and all cars are to be painted there by the end of the 2005, he said.
Body shop
Another big upgrade in the assembly plant occurred in the body shop, which adds the doors and other exterior parts after the car underbodies come over from the fabrication plant: At numerous stations, computer-controlled robots make precise welds over and over again as each car comes by. Each car has more than 2,000 welds.
Rokicki said many of the robots in the body shop have been replaced with ones that feature new technology. The number of robots also has increased, he said.
The operation of the body shop has changed significantly with a new way of framing the cars. New framing stations were installed for the upgraded technology.
Before, the cars were pieced together into a front half and a back half that had to be connected. Now, this connection is eliminated because each side of the car is built up as an entire section.
Also, the sides are attached to the underbody in layers, with the inner layer being welded in place first and then the outer layer.
Layering the car provides for better quality welds because certain areas are more accessible, Rokicki said. It also improves the stability of the frame, he said.
shilling@vindy.com