Case Study

A large producer of recreational vehicles was stamping deep drawn RV refrigerator pans from bare hot dip galvanized steel coils. The stamped parts were then shipped out for cleaning and e-coating (painting) followed by return shipment of the post painted pans back to the customer’s manufacturing facility for final assembly.

Interstate Steel Company’s VA/VE team was asked to study the customer’s current design/process and to suggest a more cost effective manufacturing technique. In order to reduce costs (and enhance surface quality), the VA/VE staff recommended that the customer consider purchasing fully finished pre-painted master coils. By applying a special highly flexible paint system over a very formable extra deep drawing hot dip galvanized grade of flat rolled steel, the refrigerator pans were able to be successfully stamped directly into finished pans ready for assembly. Even following the deep drawing process, the resulting prepainted surface finish provided a much more uniform painted surface as compared to the original post painted surface. Not only did our customer produce a higher quality part, they were also able to realize a larger than $1 million cost savings following the successful conversion from a post painted to a pre-painted end use application.