Author: mwuc14 This post originally appeared on the Measure What You See Blog. It is posted here with permission. You can find the original post here.
Example of gloss and haze standards for the BYK-Gardner haze-gloss.
Photo courtesy of BYK-Gardner.
Monitoring the performance of your Quality Control instruments is an important part of your quality process. More…
Viscosity Conversion Chart
Photo Courtesy of BYK-Gardner.
BYK-Gardner has a free Viscosity Cup Conversion Chart Poster that is available for your offices, labs or facilities around the world. If you interested in ordering a free poster, BYK-Gardner Laboratories Blog has included the form to order your viscosity poster at the bottom of this post. More…
Adhesion Cross Hatch Test.
Photo Courtesy of BYK-Gardner.
Adhesion and Flexibility are two very different yet closely related paint / film properties. By that I mean that changing one of these two properties in a product can result in changes in the other, even though they are entirely different properties.
Example of a Film Thickness Gage.
Photo Courtesy of BYK-Gardner.
There are dozens of choices today for electronic film thickness gages.
Drawdown of Paint.
Photo Courtesy of BYK-Gardner.
BYK-Gardner offers a wide range of drawdown charts for a variety of applications. Test charts are easy to use and are an inexpensive substrate to test various coating properties. BYK-Gardner uses stringent quality control during the production process to ensure the most consistent chart properties for color and gloss in the industry. Selection of the chart depends on the coating technology that needs to be tested, as well as, the coating properties that need to be evaluated.
When customers go to the store, they need to know how many gallons of paint to buy to cover the area they wish to paint. They also want to know how many coats it takes to completely hide what they are painting over. The spreading rate of a paint is how to determine how “far” a paint will go by quantifying how much area is covered for a given quantity of paint. Sometimes to compare paints, a researcher will use the same spreading rate for two different paints and then compare the hiding power visually using the background of the drawdown chart as a guide or instrumentally using a spectrophotometer.
Paint produced by the architectural paint industry must perform on a wide range of substrates. Some examples are previously coated wallboard, from glossy to flat, wood trim, plaster, uncoated wallboard, stucco, etc. The porosity of these substrates varies greatly, yet the paint must maintain the same color and gloss appearance no matter the substrate.
When we evaluate paint, we ask, “how much paint must be applied to hide the substrate below it?” or “does this paint hide better than that paint?” Opacity is a paint’s ability to prevent the transmission of light in order to hide the substrate below it. Throughout the paint industry, the terms hiding, opacity and contrast ratio have frequently been used interchangeably. Hiding is a general term used to describe all of these concepts, including hiding power. However, hiding power also takes into account the spreading rate of paint and will not be discussed here. (More information on hiding power can be found in ASTM D 2805.) More…
Even though special effects and superstars get top billing in most blockbuster movies, very little of what you see on the silver screen would be possible if not for the set designers and costume designers working when the camera isn’t rolling. These artists use fabric and makeup and wood and steel to create visual imagery that immerses the viewer in the experience. The painters on these crews are responsible not just for painting sets a specific color, but also for enhancing light and shadow, providing depth, and – above all – taking fake structures and objects and making them real.
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