[GhotiFish]

also it seems its not the paint that's expensive, but the retooling, so it's a one time cost.

really seems much ado about nothing.

[virmundi]

Amongst other points, the article says that a water based paint takes 5 times longer to dry than the oil. From a production stand point you have a bottleneck. You now need 5x capacity to dry the containers to stay even with the normal production. Since I doubt they have vertical drying racks, production should slow due to that alone.

[noir_lord]

It's a classical 'flow shop' scheduling problem.

Either you increase the number of 'machines' (lines in this case) or you increase your drying area foot print to compensate.

Once you do the latter you can produce at the same rate assuming all products produced are identical) since you the ones coming out the dry end do so at the same speed as the input end.

Edit: This does assume production demand is constant, longer pipelines make responding to demand more difficult.

[jhoechtl]

I am pretty certain paintings used for containers have little to none in common with paintings you get at the home improvement store but some observations I have made concerning water vs. oil based paintings:

* Water based paintings dry much faster than oil based paintings

* The durability is pretty much the same

* The scratch resistance of oil based paintings, once fully dried, is light years better than that of water based paintings.

In some aspects the green movement has brought us water based colors where you could water your home plants with but are inadequate for some (read: wide) range of application.

[ddalex]

You don't need 5x capacity. This is latency vs bandwidth - you're going to delay the orders during the process switch 4x the drying period, but after that, your normal throughout I back up.