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Introduction: Gary Forrest
As with medical, we have a specific individual, Dave Belforte,
who, in addition to writing for Laser Focus, publishes with Laser
Focus the Industrial Laser Review. Again, this is an area that has
some really unique aspects to it which is why we have a specialist at
the magazine who tracks this as well as having his own business interests.
I just have one quick example. One of the things that I've
noticed and I've put this in your handout is it's always interesting
to me to see why how the lasers actually impact on finished goods that
people buy. So I just clipped out one recent article that mentions
some of the different areas when lasers are used in automotive production.
There's an ad for the Infinity car of course they've had a
strange ad program anyway, but the latest version is "Look at the
paint." It's a super high gloss paint. I know in Japan, what I would
call laser priming, the use of laser in surface preparation of the
metal to obtain a super high gloss is something that's become popular.
Now I don't know whether the Infinity is using that or not but it's
another example as Moe Levitt indicated earlier lasers have moved into
the industrial segment maybe not in the volume that people would like
but in a quality sense that is definitely starting to have an impact
on the people who are buying those finished products.
So I'll give you Dave for the details.
David Belforte:
The answer is yes, the Infinity has a body which has been
processed in what is called laser texturizing process. In Japan, it's
known as a mirror finish, and it's not actually applied to the steel
of the car. It's a texturizing process on the rolls that reduce the
steel down to body thickness. They emboss on that steel a regular
pattern which tends to trap radiated light and reflect it back to your
eye in a much more intense pattern to give you what appears to be
brighter paint. But that was not developed in Japan. It was
developed in Belgium actually.
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