It was a row of robot arms in a customer’s staging area that caught my attention in March 2024. Each one had the same cracked edge along its base. The paint peeled back like sunburned skin. The plant manager said: “It’s your coating.”
I’ve been a quality manager at Axalta Coating Systems for over four years. I review roughly 200 coating and adhesive specifications a year. I’ve rejected about 6% of first-article inspections in 2024. And I’ve learned one thing that still surprises me: most coating failures aren’t about the coating.
For anyone new to this: Axalta Coating Systems is a global supplier of liquid, powder, and industrial coatings. You’ll find it on car bodies, truck frames, machine components, and metal furniture. If you’re researching Axalta coating systems company overview, that’s the short version. If you’re considering Axalta coating systems employment, know that the job often looks like this: factory floor, a calibration block, and a customer who needs to ship parts on Friday.
The batch that failed at unit 800
The robot arms had a waterborne two-component polyurethane topcoat over a structural adhesive. The customer switched adhesive suppliers two months earlier to save money. The first 300 units looked fine. By unit 800, the coating was lifting along the bond line. Their first instinct was to blame the topcoat.
I didn’t argue. I got out a coating thickness gauge.
Dry film thickness readings were in the 3.2 to 3.8 mil range—actually 3.2 to 3.6, I’d have to check the report. Either way, within spec. The gauge told me the topcoat wasn’t under-applied. So I kept going. A crosshatch adhesion test failed cleanly along the adhesive line. The failure wasn’t in the coating. It was in the substrate next to the coating.
Per ASTM D7091, the standard practice for measuring dry film thickness on non-magnetic substrates, I take readings on actual parts, not just smooth test panels. That discipline helped here. The flat panels looked perfect. The geometry where the adhesive sat told a different story.
The new adhesive was a fast-grab neoprene spray adhesive. It had strong initial tack, but it never fully cross-linked before the topcoat bake. The residual solvent outgassed during curing and lifted the coating from underneath. No coating thickness was going to prevent that.
What I mean by “best adhesives for industrial automation”
People ask me about the best adhesives for industrial automation. The honest answer is: it depends on the rest of the line. A strong adhesive that takes twenty minutes to reach handling strength might be fine in a manual cell. On an automated line with a four-minute transfer to the oven, it’s a bottleneck.
Everything I read early in my career said select adhesive by shear strength. In practice, I found the opposite. For automated coating lines, the best adhesives for industrial automation are the ones with a predictable open time and a cure profile that matches the downstream coating process. A fast grab feels efficient. It can also trap solvent—and then your expensive coating starts peeling.
I’m not an adhesive chemist, so I can’t walk you through polymer cross-linking. What I can tell you from a coating perspective is simple: if the adhesive is still outgassing when the coating cures, every coating thickness gauge on the floor won’t save the batch.
Are spray paints oil based? The second problem
While the line was cooling, an operator asked me: are spray paints oil based? He was touching up a scratched panel with a rattle can. The label said enamel. He assumed that meant oil-based.
Some spray paints are oil-based. Some are water-based. The front label isn’t enough. The carrier system is on the back label or the SDS. If you put a solvent-based spray enamel over a cured waterborne industrial coating, you can get solvent lifting at the edge. Apply enough of it and the film traps solvent, creating blisters later.
We checked his touch-up with the same gauge. He had built about 12 mils over a 3-mil spec coating. That was the second issue. The repair was becoming a future failure.
From the outside, it looked like a paint problem. The reality was process change plus repair habits. It’s tempting to simplify it to “spray paint is oil-based.” The useful quality answer is: check the SDS, and don’t touch up a spec finish with a rattle can unless you’re ready to verify the film thickness afterward.
The cost and the fix
That failed batch cost the customer roughly $18,000 in rework and delayed their launch by two weeks. We rejected the affected units before they shipped. 8,000 parts in storage, a large share with adhesion risk. Not ideal. But fixable. Measurement wins.
We rewrote the adhesive specification. Required a simple gel test before the oven. Added a crosshatch check at the start of every shift. First-pass yield went from 78% to 94% over the next month. The coating chemistry didn’t change. The process did.
The paint is the easy part. The process is where quality lives.
What I’d tell someone considering Axalta coating systems employment
If you’re looking at Axalta coating systems employment, be ready for this. You’ll spend more time with thermometers, gauges, and adhesion testers than with paint samples. You’ll learn to trust the measurement, not the story.
The checklist in my head is simple: substrate stable, adhesive cured, coating thickness verified. In that order. The gauge answers the third question. It does not answer the first two.
And if someone asks you whether spray paints are oil based, don’t say “yes” or “no.” Say “let’s check the SDS.” That’s not a chemist’s answer. It’s a quality manager’s answer.