![]() Drywall and prefabricationĭuco reduced the time required to paint a car in color from weeks down to hours, solving the problem of an extremely time-consuming finishing process (though automotive paint would continue to improve). Drywall would continue to grow in popularity, and by the 1980s, more than 90% of residential construction was done using drywall instead of plaster. And after the war, the pent-up demand for housing placed a large premium on being able to build quickly, resulting in builders frequently turning to it - Levitt, for instance, used gypsum wallboard in their large scale housing developments. Wallboard would once again widely substitute for plaster during WWII in defense housing construction, due to the shortage of materials and the need to build quickly. This was at least partly due to building code requirements (which often specifically required plaster walls) and advocacy by plasterer’s unions (which opposed the use of an alternative wall finish that didn’t require a plasterer to install). Gypsum board used as a lath replacement was outselling wallboard 3-to-1 by 1939, and the number of plasterers in the country would not peak until 1950 (at 64,000). As a result, colors became widely available on cars - the Model A, which followed the Model T, was available in 78 different colors. A car could now be finished in a single 8 hour shift. Duco cut the labor required to finish a car body by 15%, and eliminated a third of the painting steps along with three 24-hour periods of drying. When the barrel was opened, the solution had become much thinner, and the researchers realized that the thin but high-nitrocellulose-content solution might be useful as a lacquer. In the course of their experiments, they made a batch of nitrocellulose solution with added sodium acetate, but a power failure in the plant resulted in it sitting idle for several days. Duco was discovered by accident while researchers were trying to stop static electricity from causing streaks on nitrocellulose movie film. The product that changed this was Duco, a quick drying automotive lacquer developed by DuPont in the early 1920s. Additionally, the colored paints then available weren’t durable, and would start to chip and flake off after a short time. ![]() A plant producing 1000 cars a day would need 20 acres of indoor storage for cars in the process of being painted. ![]() Altogether it took 2-4 weeks to paint a car, and huge volumes of work-in-progress (WIP) accumulated. The colored paints available at the time could only be applied in thin layers with small amounts of pigment, and painting required multiple cycles of applying a coat and waiting for it to dry. ![]() Higher end cars such as Cadillacs were available in different colors, but painting them was a long and tedious process. The only cheap, durable finish available for cars was a baked black enamel. This restriction was largely driven by the limitations of automotive paint technology at the time. Henry Ford famously said that customers could have the Model T in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. ![]()
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