• Review of ECS 2007
• Ciba® XYMARA™ at the European Coatings Show
• Ciba® IRGAZIN® DPP Cosmoray™ Orange
• Ciba® XYMARA™ METASHEEN® "11 Series"
• Color Trend Vision - Introduction

Onto the fast lane with the Cosmoray™ Car

By Le Vin Chin

You may have seen our Cosmoray Car in the gleaming painted flesh at the recent European Coatings Show (ECS), but what you didn’t see was that we had thrills and spills aplenty on our road to getting it there! Here’s the scoop …

The decision to go for a car as an illustration of the cool offerings provided by Ciba was an easy one to make at the end of 2006. The primary idea was to showcase the possibilities presented by various of our new technologies and products – our innovative and proprietary PlasmaCure™ UV curing process, which renders paintwork impervious to scratches and scuffing; our revolutionary new DPP pigment Ciba® IRGAZIN® DPP Cosmoray™ Orange, which offers orange shades never seen before; and our Ciba® XYMARA™ Metasheen® 11-series, bringing highly reflective liquid metal effects to paint coatings – on the bodywork of a single car, at the ECS, in May 2007.

The team approached a major car producer to help them. Although they were very willing, the goal of having the car ready in time for the ECS made it difficult, as their manufacturing locations were widely dispersed, making the coordinated production of many matching parts difficult.

As Plan B, team-leader Peter Simmendinger offered his daughter’s own Mini Cooper as canvas for the exercise, and he approached a major paint-maker to produce a one-off paint based on the shade chosen by his daughter Daniela: the Color Trend Vision Primary Optimistic Energy styling. Again they hit a roadblock: the major paint company could not quickly put the styling, which is based on the new Cosmoray Orange pigment, into their production processes! Meanwhile, the clock was ticking, counting down to the ECS.

Luckily, the team was able to quickly find a smaller paint company who could work with a fast turnaround and was also capable of doing one-off customised re-spraying of cars. The company, MIPA, of Landshut in Germany, was only too happy to help. “It was our big chance to show a wide audience what a small company can do,” said Dr. Peter Rohr, the Technical Director of MIPA. “We move much quicker than the major paint makers because we have laboratories and spray facilities well equipped and prepared to color match and apply paints in various systems to create unique prototypes for our industry partners. Plus, we can make prompt decisions because we have very few levels of hierarchy.”

The MIPA team certainly found it easy to develop a refinish paint to match Primary Optimistic Energy using Cosmoray Orange, and within two weeks, the car was an entirely new orange color! (Environmentalists take note: the Cosmoray Car was painted using the latest water-based basecoats and high paint systems, giving little to no solvent emission into the environment.)

All fine and dandy so far, the journey to the ECS had had some adventures but no serious hairpin bends … until the car disappeared! It was en route to the next destination, the auto dealer who would put Metasheen coated wheels onto the car – produced by BBS, who have been using coatings based on Metasheen on their wheels for 5 years – when suddenly, no-one could find it. In the event, the car had simply been mislaid at the dealer, but Peter Simmendinger recalls the day as one of the worst of his career: “I was tearing my hair out! It was Friday and the ECS was due to start the following week! Luckily, late that evening, the car was found in one of the dealer’s lots, apparently moved by mistake.”

So it was with relief that Simmendinger finally drove the Cosmoray Car to the ECS, where it was the stand-out hit of the Ciba booth. It was four and a half months after the project had begun, barely a moment in the timescales of automotive paint coatings, but faced with the challenge to achieve a lot in a very short time, and with a willing and dynamic partner company, he’d won the race.