Turns out there’s more entertainment value to paint than just watching it dry.
A production crew from The History Channel show “Modern Marvels” was in Everett last week, filming workers at Goodrich Corp.’s Paine Field jet maintenance facility as they painted airplanes.
“It was amazing to watch the process,” said Anthony Lacques, who is producing the episode.
In case you haven’t got your TiVo programmed for it already, “Modern Marvels” is a regular feature on The History Channel.
Typically it features the stories behind great accomplishments in engineering and technology. Last month’s episodes focused on topics including battle tanks, the U.S. highway system, transcontinental railroads, giant construction machinery, bulletproof materials used in body armor and vehicles – and a two-part look at private jets.
But while trains, planes and automobiles are the show’s mainstays, Lacques said his favorite episodes are those that explore the technology behind every-day items. He’s working on upcoming features on glue, bricks, sewers – and the episode that brought his team to Everett, paint.
“I like the ones where we take a pretty mundane topic and pull the lid off it and look through the science behind it,” he said. “As you get into the technology behind it, you realize there’s a lot we take for granted.”
The paint episode starts with Paleolithic-era artists painting on cave walls and progresses to the state-of-the-art in today’s painting technology, in the automotive and aerospace industries.
“It’s a lot of material to cram into an hour,” Lacques said.
Lacques and a two-man crew spent two days last week while workers from Associated Painters – the contractors who paint planes for Goodrich – worked on a 757 belonging to United Parcel Service, which was getting a new brown-and-gold paint job after undergoing a maintenance check.
He described the paint hangar team as “extremely helpful.” After the requisite safety training “they let us get as close as we wanted.”
Lacques said he was impressed by two things: the sheer scale of the job – jets are big things to paint, after all – and the level of precision that’s expected of the painters.
“It’s that combination, and they have to do it fast,” Lacques said. “An airplane sitting in a hangar is costing someone money.”
Lacques and his team also are working fast. The paint episode is scheduled to air on April 27. (“Modern Marvels” typically is on at 10 p.m. in our area, but check The Herald’s TV listings or historychannel.com for updates.)
All in all, the basics of paint aren’t all that different now than they were 20,000, even 30,000 years ago, Lacques said. Cave painters started with a bright metallic pigment – often a chunk of bright red iron oxide. They’d grind that rock up and mix it into a resin – typically animal fat. The chemistry’s more advanced now, but that’s the same process used to make paints today, he said.
Oh, and feel free to make all the watching-paint-dry jokes you want. The show, Lacques said with a chuckle, “is partially about paint drying. That’s one of the key elements to paint – it dries. Otherwise, it wouldn’t work.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
