Charles Frenzel » paint

Nancy Cassell

charles frenzel — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:11:05 +0000

Between her husband’s foolishness and her son’s rebellious attitude, how was she supposed to save Cassell Paints from ruin?
Nancy Cassell, half owner of the family business, was dressed in a long sleeved blue blouse to protect the fair skin of her arms from the burning sun. To shade her face she wore a wide brimmed tricolor cotton hat that seemed more French than American despite the red, white, and blue stripes. Light wool slacks were cooler than cotton and emphasized a figure that was trim for a woman in her mid-fifties.
Together, she and her husband Blain had sweated to build their paint business, to subdue the encroaching waters, to drive back the mosquitoes and to hold control over a company that had gone into debt many times in order to grow and compete in the paint business.
This land had always been tough to conquer. Since the time of the failed British campaign launched from the east against New Orleans in 1814, the hundred acres of shifting shell banks and soft sand that hosted Cassell Paints had perniciously resisted development. That is, until she and her husband Blain Cassell had cleared the brush and sunk pilings into the treacherous soil. They built their original paint manufacturing plant near the bayou at the back of the property figuring to take advantage of the waterway to move materials to and from the port. Five years later they moved everything nearer the road after being wiped out by rising water from a hurricane. The new facility was protected by eight foot levees on the south and east and a new drainage canal on the north.
Although Fall was supposed to bring cooler weather, Nancy Cassell wondered if the heat and humidity would ever moderate. Heat and humidity were bad for paint manufacturing—the high humidity ruined the resins and the heat caused problems with the volatile solvents. For the second week, New Orleans sweltered under a haze of chemical laden salt air. On the east side of New Orleans where all of the noxious materials seemed to settle, there wasn’t much in the way of Gulf breeze to disperse the brown layers of pollution. Light puff ball clouds floated slowly overhead while air movement sputtered eratically at ground level. The short shadows cast by the midday sun were colored a pale yellowish gray.
The six foot ventilation fans on the roof of the production area alternately growled or whined as the direction of the light breeze changed and the blades tried to make headway against fumes escaping from the mixing tanks that produced industrial paints of various grades and colors. Inside, carefully calibrated portions of expensive pigment mixtures were being added to a variety of viscous resins, thinned with high quality solvents, and finally sealed in drums and cans. Some of the paint would go on ship’s hulls, some on helicopter decks and military vehicles, and some would be used on railway cars and construction equipment. There were cheaper lines of product designed for ordinary architectural use. According to their motto, wherever the going was tough, Cassell Coatings were there to serve you.
She felt the circles of perspiration soaking through her blue blouse and the sweat running down the back of her neck as she held a bundle of important paperwork away from her body. She threaded her way around a stack of scrap steel that was as hot as a frying pan, avoided some black creosoted timbers that smelled like old railroad ties and cat piss, and stopped to look carefully for snakes before she stepped out onto the service walk along the wall of the last loading bay.
Nancy was determined that she wasn’t going to let her husband, Blain Sr. screw up the nuclear power plant project that she had launched despite a storm of protest from the board of directors. She saw the project as Cassell Coating’s last chance to redeem itself from the debacle over the antifouling coating business. They must succeed or else they’d have to sell out. She was afraid that Blain was already headed down his usual self destructive course.
Nancy Cassell turned the corner of the warehouse and continued on her short cut towards the laboratory building. As if to mock her efforts to save her company, she had to cross a path of brown grass that led towards an abandoned corner of the property. One of the “hopes” for the future of Cassell Coatings used to be reached down that path, now hidden behind a screen of bushes out of direct sight.
Blain’s great project had done so well and had gone so wrong. Nine years back, Cassell’s antifoulingi coating, their number one money making product, was going to be banned from U.S. ports as well as many marine facilities around the world as old-formulation antifouling coatings for ships had been changed under pressure from environmental restrictions. In desperation, Cassell Coatings had started talks with Coastal Technical Associates in hopes of developing new coatings to replace the old ones. Miraculously, CTA chemists had hit upon a unique solution that held considerable promise. Cassell couldn’t afford the normal strategy of trying thousands of formulas, testing, moving into hundreds of coatings, testing, and then getting to the one or two formulas that held promise, so Blain had okayed a budget for a lab scale trial and gambled on an all-or-nothing approach based on CTA’s untried theory.
Nancy’s education was in business, but even she had understood the implications of the chemistry.
Batches produced in the lab confirmed the theory. The price would be highly competitive because Cassell wouldn’t have to add any other, more expensive ingredients to their paint. In less than three years they had possession of a low toxicity, effective coating with a slow release the defended a ship’s hull against the onset of barnacle growth. Blain knew that they could revolutionize the antifouling industry.

Failure

charles frenzel — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:09:52 +0000

They paid CTA for the list of chemical ingredients, the precise solvent information, and the data specifying reaction temperatures. Cassell received a list of relatively simple instructions: put a condenser on the reactor; don’t get the reaction too hot. CTA also proposed to design a scaled up reactor and do the testing for additional funding.
Then the troubles started. She remembered when Blain had insisted on hiring a certain Dr. Fuchs, a German manufacturing consultant who, or so it seemed to Nancy, came so highly recommended but with suspiciously faint praise. Nancy flushed with anger at the memory of the way she and her husband had been manipulated by the smooth talking consultant. She had been amazed when Blain was taken in by the thick spread of flattery concerning the genius of American entrepreneurs such as Cassell that Fuchs delivered in a heavy accent during drinks after an expensive dinner—the astronomical charges for which the consultant paid and later added to his billing. Nancy Cassell was also skeptical of the way the man retreated into heavily accented German when she tried to pin him down on the finer points of the design.
Fuchs, whose name translated as Fox, was to design the reaction vessel for large production batches. Nancy had felt a strong sense of unease when Cassell decided not to inform CTA that he was building the reaction vessel with Fuch’s help, citing delays on the project when CTA made friendly inquiries. Hadn’t the CTA people always been helpful and honest with them?
Nancy gritted her teeth when Blain Cassell hired an expensive patent lawyer to work with Dr. Fuchs. Without telling Fuchs or her husband, she had sent the patent draft to CTA for review. CTA replied, commenting that the claims were too broad—something she had thought all along. They were particularly critical of Dr. Fuchs for adding language to cover a large number of metals and other organometalic compounds. CTA felt that a more specific patent would be acceptable. In time, CTA as well as Nancy were proven right when Blain, who by that time had spent more money than their business cold afford on patent lawyers and consultants, had the patent thrown out.
Acting on an angry impulse, she turned left and walked down the overgrown path. She paused to study a horned toad blinking sleepily atop a mound of sun bleached shells—the fascinating little creatures would soon disappear as fire ants from Mexico moved into the area. She remembered the skeletons of dead beetles and insects that used to litter the path. At least the evidence of their folly had now returned to Mother Earth. How could Blain not have known that Fuch’s design of the reactor was terribly wrong?
The rusted remains of Blain’s Folly squatted on ugly steel supports on a cracked concrete pad in front of her. The steel ramp that led to the control panel had fallen away on one side leaving scars across the side of the main tank. Old gauges were half filled with water, missing switches and valve controls were open holes gaping in panels, and once-shiny stainless piping was now covered in the white veneer of corrosion. How stupid the whole thing seemed, now.
As she recalled, the Cassell lab crew just couldn’t seem to get the temperature up to the right range in the reaction vessel. The exterior oil bath that heated the tank would get so hot that the whole reactor was in danger of burning up. No matter what the heater temperature, the interior mix never seemed to reach the temperature that CTA had specified. Nancy wanted to get CTA over to look at the large scale reactor, but every time she mentioned the possibility to her husband he would send in Fuchs who would explain to her how near they were to a solution. Finally, with the rejection of the patent, the company abandoned the project.
Bitterly, Nancy remembered CTA’s recent site visit to discuss procedural improvements necessary for Cassell’s entry into the nuclear coating business. CTA saw the old reactor, wondered aloud why they weren’t told of it, and with Nancy’s permission, looked over the installation. Within five minutes they had the solution. It seemed that the thermometer probe was near the top of the vessel in the vapor, not down at the liquid level. Blain couldn’t make it work because he was measuring the temperature of a cooler condensate, not the liquid product. Consequently, the whole thing was overheated and the reaction spoiled. Also, because of the severe overheating and the vapor leaks, the toxic materials from the overheated reactor had contaminated the surrounding area and caused some of the plants and most of the insects to die off.
Nancy couldn’t help remembering that another paint company that was much larger that Cassell filed for a similar patent about two years later. The patent claims didn’t have the excess baggage of broad claims, and the patent was granted. CTA had warned her that when Cassell abandoned the patent someone else would be right on the spot to follow up.
So now, even if Cassell Coatings wanted to make the material, they would have either an expensive “prior art” case to fight or they would have to pay royalties for a material process that they invented. The irony was that CTA had a trial formula applied to the hull of a sailboat in the New Orleans yacht harbor. Sam Friendly—the Friendly Lady–had made many voyages along the Gulf coast. After five years, Nancy understood the coating was performing perfectly.

As she stood there in the heat, tears mingled with sweat on her face, a fierce deterimination to survive gripped her. How could Cassell get so close to a new product and not get it produced, accepted, and on the market? These were questions she would not let slip, this time. They could have sold the material or the process to all of the major marine coatings manufacturers and made millions. Nancy was more than a little frustrated with her son and her husband. Because of Blain Jr. and his meddling, she was behind on the payments to Nightwing Labs. The investment in a new product line only to abandon it wasn’t going to happen with the nuclear coatings. They would survive or fail as a company on the success this venture.
Even Blain realized that Nightwing labs and their Design Basis Accident tests were crucial to the success of their coatings. The anger inside of her overwhelmed her; she ran back along the path, feeling faint and nauseated.
She didn’t remember quite how she got to the laboratory building behind the old house. The cold air startled her as she gasped and staggered back against the wall inside the door. Except for the offices in the house up front, the lab building was the only place air conditioned at the plant. No one was at the front desk—probably back in the quality control lab where things like viscosity and color for each batch of paint was measured against the standard for that particular product. She walked in to Blain Jr.’s office where she overheard him talking on the phone.
“I’d like to speak with Mary Mouton,” he was saying. “No, it’s not personal, it’s about the coatings tests you’re doing for us. I’d like to know if I can substitute a new batch of samples for the ones we submitted. We’ve got a new formulation that I think will pass the tests.”
Her son saw her.” Look, just have her call me later if you can do the substitution,” he placed the receiver back on its cradle. “What can I do for you, Mom?” he asked.
Nancy took time to look over her son’s face. He was his father in almost every way. His was the same squared face and jaw line that she’d liked when she’d met his father. There was that air of vision and toughness that dissolved into such a charming and compassionate smile that had captured her heart. After the terrible accident that scarred one side of her husbands face, it was a blessing to be able to see the younger, untouched version, again.