Lev­el­ing/Sag­ging Tester

In most cases, lev­el­ing is a desired prop­erty of paints expressed in the fact that the cured film shows a sur­face as plain as pos­si­ble with brush marks, spray drops or other uneven­nesses occur­ing as lit­tle as pos­si­ble. Sag­ging, how­ever, is con­sid­ered a paint defect, par­tic­u­larly occur­ing on ver­ti­cal sur­faces, in edges and corn­ers. The most com­mon terms, for exam­ple streaks or tear drops, per­fectly describe its char­ac­teris­tic appear­ance. It is not always pos­si­ble, or only with dif­fi­cul­ties, to mea­sure this type of flow behavior by means of vis­come­ters.

• Sim­ple com­pari­son test of the lev­el­ing and sag­ging prop­er­ties of paints in the period between appli­ca­tion and dry­ing
• One appli­ca­tor to test lev­el­ing and sag­ging
• Cor­ro­sion resis­tant stain­less steel con­struc­tion

5 pairs of gaps for lev­el­ing test:
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.5 1.0 mm

10 steps for sag­ging test:
75 100 125 150 175 200 225 250 275 300 µm

Lev­el­ing Test Pro­ce­dure

– Draw the paint to be tested over a plane sub­s­trate (test chart), pro­duc­ing 5 pairs of streaks of vari­ous film thick­nesses
– Hold the test panel in a hor­i­zon­tal posi­tion, and observe which of the pairs of streaks con­verge
– Gen­er­ally, the gap depth of that pair of streaks is indi­cated, where the inter­vals between the streaks are slightly vis­i­ble

Sag­ging Test Pro­ce­dure

– Apply the coat­ing, form­ing 10 streaks of vari­ous thick­nesses
– Imme­di­ately after appli­ca­tion, place the test panel into a ver­ti­cal posi­tion, with the thinnest film streak at the top, avoid­ing any shock
– Depend­ing on the sag­ging ten­dency the separate streaks con­verge
– For a repro­duc­tion of the results, which is dif­fi­cult any­way, it is impor­tant to work under con­s­tant cli­matic con­di­tions, to apply film streaks uni­formly, and to set a time for eval­u­a­tion