You didn't get hired to be a chemist. You got hired to be a really precise baker. The resin makers, pigment producers, and additive houses already did the heavy chemistry. By the time a drum shows up at your dock, the chemistry is baked in. Your job is knowing what each ingredient does, how much to use, and how it behaves alongside everything else in the can. That's a learnable skill, and it's what this part of the series is built around.

By the early 1970s the coatings industry was running well — latex owned architectural, epoxy and polyurethane were established in industrial work, and chromate pigments were the gold standard for anti-corrosion primers. Then the government stepped in, and what followed is the most consequential forced reformulation in this industry's history.