The steering wheel is the interior component which is touched with the highest frequency. To improve the feel of the steering wheel, this project developed a soft in-mold paint which enables a soft-feeling design to be added in the existing in-mold painting method. The target was to achieve the feel of aniline leather, which is the most pleasant leather to touch. Equipment measuring the sense of friction was utilized to obtain values for friction to which a standard deviation was applied, enabling measurement of softness and the sense of grip necessary for steering. The use of a combination of soft polyester resin and urethane resin beads in the paint mixture and a soft-type polyester-denatured hexamethylene diisocyanate (HMDI) as the hardener has given the paint a very soft feel.
Article of Honda R&D Technical Review Vol.15 No.2 (195 - 200)