When the Coating Plant Engineering Company’s Technological Approach Makes a Difference

Two companies united by the same technological approach to customer needs: FAE, a world leader in the production of forestry, agricultural, road, and demining machinery, has chosen to work with SAVIM Europe for the installation of a new coating system that combines manual and automatic application in a small space and handles bulky parts efficiently thanks to a CM Automazione conveyor. An example of how a plant engineering company can grasp its customers’ needs and turn them into the ideal design, regardless of the size of the coating line.

A company’s technological approach is a method or strategy involving the use of technology-based tools, devices, systems, and solutions to address, solve, or improve specific problems or processes. In manufacturing, this calls for a focus on continuous innovation, the updating of skills, and the ability to adapt to changing technologies – exactly what we report about in the pages of our magazines specifically dedicated to industrial coating processes. Regardless of the size and complexity of the line to be designed and built, a company’s technological contribution lies in the engineering and technical skills that enable it to customise a project according to space, production, and customer requirements. Here, small footprints and special needs are precisely the technological challenges that allow a plant engineering firm to prove its actual know-how.

“This approach also embeds our mission,” says Gianluca Morandi, the Supply Chain Manager of FAE Group S.p.A., which specialises in the design and production of heads for tractors, excavators, skid steers, special vehicles, and tracked carriers for forestry, agricultural, demining, and road works. “Our company focuses on technological innovation and construction quality to guarantee its machines’ maximum performance and reliability. Each product, each accessory, each optional component is designed with the utmost accuracy, the highest quality materials, and the most advanced technologies. The task of the vehicles we put on the road is to make it as easy and efficient as possible to operate them according to the specific applications, conditions, and environments.”

At the beginning of 2023, FAE installed a new coating plant at its headquarters in Fondo (Trento, Italy). “We turned to SAVIM Europe Srl (Arbizzano, Verona, Italy) because it was the only plant engineering company able to grasp our needs and turn them into the project we had in mind, designing a plant with the perfect size for the limited quantity of batches we process daily without letting this limit the technological value of the system, which is in fact of high quality.”

FAE’s products, from forest to road

Founded as an artisan business in 1989, FAE started out by designing and building equipment for forestry machines. In the early 2000s, the company integrated its production of forestry mulchers with accessories for construction machinery and road planers. In 2005, it inaugurated a new line for the manufacture of tracked carriers. Today, FAE employs around 400 people and has a global turnover of 170 million Euros. Its portfolio consists of 3 macro-lines including 90 products and 400 models: Land Clearing, designed to speed up and facilitate a wide range of forestry and agricultural tasks, operating in woods and forests, farmland, rivers and canals, natural areas, and urban greenery; Construction, for use in construction sites on roads, highways, paths, quarries, mines, and infrastructure in general; and Demining, for the reclamation and restoration for civil use of otherwise dangerous and unusable land, with products ideal for roads, paths, and agricultural and forestry areas where mines are present.

“75% of our products carry the FAE brand, whereas the remaining 25% are made for major global OEMs of which our company is a supplier,” explains Morandi. “We are present in the world’s most strategic markets for this sector: in North America, particularly the United States and Canada, as well as in France, Germany, Australia, and now also China.”

Production is carried out exclusively in three Italian factories. The headquarters is located in Fondo, in the heart of Trentino’s Non Valley, and houses the administrative, sales, and marketing divisions, the technical department for product design, the pre-assembly, coating, and testing departments, the warehouse also for spare parts, and the logistics division. A plant in Vipiteno (Bolzano) is tasked with machining one of the most critical components, the rotor. Finally, a production site near Vicenza manufactures semi-finished components from coils.

“All our machines and accessories,” notes Morandi, “are designed to make a difference not only in the task they perform but also for the planet, given the importance of some of their applications to our world. This is what each person in our team, each partner, each customer works for every day: this is exactly the spirit of FAE.”

A significant contribution to the planet

From land clearing to demining, the contribution of this company’s products is especially critical for recovering and maintaining areas subject to environmental disasters, such as fires, and restoring areas destined for new uses. Unfortunately, forest fires are a growing phenomenon, amplified by climate change and poor land management in many exposed areas. “If we consider that since 2000 in the United States alone, which is one of our main markets, fires have destroyed seven million acres of land annually, and that their rate of destruction has sadly doubled in the last twenty years, figures are indeed worrying.

The social, environmental, and economic impact of such calamities has drawn attention to the importance of fire management and prevention worldwide. And that is where FAE’s equipment truly makes a difference. “One of the most effective measures to stop the spread of a fire is creating firebreaks, i.e. areas free of vegetation within forests or natural areas. Not only do they contain the fire in a delimited area, but they can also be used by wild animals as a safe haven from the flames and by fire-fighting teams to extinguish the fire and carry out the necessary work to maintain the vegetation. Forestry mulching is environmentally friendly and economical and is currently the most efficient way to preserve soil quality. During this process, our machines leave a nutritious mulch on the soil to provide moisture and vital nutrients and suppress unwanted plant species. Our products are, therefore, actively involved in the fight against fires, and we are proud to help save our forests for future generations.”

The path towards total quality

The need to expand its coating department, previously consisting of one booth for manual application, arose for FAE with an increase in production volumes. “The new plant has soon become one of our strengths in guaranteeing the quality of our components. It is equipped with two static booths for manual application and a semi-automatic booth equipped with a robot and linked to a power & free conveyor by CM Automazione (Giussano, Monza e Brianza, Italy) handling 12 load bars with a maximum capacity of 700 kg each. The robotic booth allows much faster work, whereas the manual ones ensure high flexibility, as they can treat various types of components, including large ones which are moved with a manual conveyor with pneumatic switches designed by SAVIM. The flash-off and drying tunnel is linked to a water heating system fed by a biomass heating plant. The entire line was integrated into the ERP system to monitor the progress of each stage through the company’s management software.

Coating small batches: FAE’s requirement

The company did not need to install a large, complex coating line. “Most of the components we use for our products,” Morandi emphasises, “are coated by contractors or in-house at our other two sites. This factory treats pre-assembled components that must be coated for aesthetic purposes. The design for the new system had to reconcile our need for maximum versatility to handle parts of different types, sizes, and shapes with the limited space we had available. One of the characteristics of this factory area is that it has very little space to handle large workpieces.

Therefore, we installed a 26 x 13 m plant including the two static booths – i.e. a dry spray booth for manual application on parts weighing up to 1,500 kg and a water-curtain spray booth – and the water-curtain robotised booth for semi-automatic coating of parts up to 1.80 m. They are all linked to a Graco coating management unit with a high-pressure pump.”

“Only 20% of the components sent for coating are pre-treated with manual degreasing; for the others, no mechanical or chemical pre-treatment is necessary. This is another special aspect of our coating process,” states Morandi. “We carry out one-coat and two-coat (primer + topcoat) application processes. For one-coat applications in the robotised booth, where we paint the rotors, the most important components in our production, we use a DTM water-based coating supplied by Inver[1], the INVERPUR MU”. “It’s a two-component water-soluble primer/finish with acrylic resins and formulated with anti-corrosive pigments,” states the Sherwin-Williams technical team. “It’s particularly suitable where aesthetic appearance is of primary importance and a simplified painting process using a single product is required: it can indeed be used, as in this case, as a DTM (direct-to-metal) solution. The product forms a hard and elastic film with a gloss level of up to 60-65 gloss, offering good adhesion to steel, aluminium, and cathodic coating supports, as well as good corrosion resistance. Thanks to its acrylic resin formulation, it also provides excellent light resistance.”

For the other parts, depending on their characteristics, two-component paints applied in one or two coats with cup guns are used: the quantity of product applied is so limited that no mixing machine is required. In addition to the perfectly tailored design, another feature of this line FAE particularly appreciated is the ease with which the components can be handled and finished in just a few hours, thanks to the replacement of the overhead crane with a specially designed conveyor. “SAVIM not only provided us with valuable assistance,” Morandi notes, “but also acted as the project’s prime contractor, interfacing with the other suppliers of the line’s functional devices, from CM Automazione for the conveyor to CMA Robotics, specialising in the design and construction of coating robots, and Hydro Italia, responsible for designing and installing the booths’ water treatment system.”

Some of the coating line’s devices

The articulated robot

“The GR 630 articulated robot,” says Marco Zanor, Sales Director at CMA Robotics (Pavia di Udine, Udine, Italy), “is an electronically controlled machine with six degrees of freedom, designed to automatically perform both liquid (as in this case) and powder coating operations on metal, wood, and plastic surfaces. The robot’s arm ensures maximum manoeuvrability thanks to a system of joints, perfect pneumatic balancing via the patented smart balance system, and special lightweight alloys. Additional flexibility in use is achieved through the particular wrist configuration, which allows each axis to rotate 360°, making it easy to reach any point on the workpieces. For this specific project, we installed our latest self-learning technology, called VR Tracking, which enables robot programming without needing to physically move its arm. Essentially, we use the robot’s gun, which can be detached with a very simple mechanism, and then perform the painting of the object as if it were a manual spray gun. After reattaching the paint gun, the robot can repeat the cycle executed by the operator. An additional advantage is that the programmed trajectory can be modified at the terminal with a simple mouse movement.” Zanor adds: “The previous technology, which required moving the robot arm and was first invented and used in the 1970s, is now outdated. CMA Robotics, always at the forefront with its solutions in the painting sector, is a pioneer in the market with its new VR Tracking system.”

The wastewater treatment system

The spray booth water treatment system is a Hydrofloty 6M model installed by Hydro Italia (Medicina, Bologna, Italy). “We placed a submersible pump in an optimal position inside the booth to maintain the continuous movement of the tank water, which is then sucked by a pipe,” Davide Solmi, Sales Manager at Hydro Italia, explains.

“A special aeration system enriches the circulating mass with tiny air bubbles that adhere to the sludge layer, thus facilitating their surfacing (flotation) and removal with a skimming blade. The submersible pump conveys this mixture of water and air to the flotation unit, where sludge is separated from water. Before reaching this machine, a special chemical can be added to help separation. A pneumatically driven skimming blade continuously pushes the floating particles from the surface of the flotation unit tank to its outlet, from where they fall into a sludge container equipped with a disposable filter bag, which, in turn, is fixed to a movable container. The sludge accumulated on the bottom of the system can be disposed of, whereas the recovered, purified water flows by gravity back into the spray booth.

Conclusions

“We could have simply built a plant with a single booth. However, we did not want to lose the flexibility that has always characterised our coating process, and SAVIM Europe’s team fully understood how crucial this aspect was for us. Thanks to their collaboration, already at the design stage, we opted for two plant systems with different characteristics in one space-saving structure. The automation solutions integrated have enabled us to improve the handling of parts within our factory, helping optimise the logistics of the entire department. We have also seen a further advantage in the line’s reduced maintenance frequency thanks to water filtration.”
FAE’s objective was to obtain a plant that was not oversized compared to its processed batches’ volume while still offering the necessary flexibility to handle any increase in production.

“This goal was achieved thanks to the technological contribution and advice of SAVIM Europe, whose technical staff constantly aims to expand and improve its technical, production, and service structure in order to respond in the best possible way to the needs of its customers. Our company is happy to be one of them.”