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Shop’s Commitment to Perfection Leads to High Guest Satisfaction |
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Written by Karyn Hendricks
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Friday, 25 April 2008 |
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Page 2 of 3
The body shop is air conditioned with dropped ceilings and outstanding attention to detail and perfection. ProSpot installed a ceiling-mounted welding system consisting of three different overhead installations totaling over 560’ (190 m). There are eight Resistance spot welding heads servicing over 40 working stalls, each covering two stalls (40’ wide). A third rail has been added to support the extra wide bridges.
Car-O-Liner frame racks and Car-tronix measuring system are complemented by the Hunter RMHD alignment rack with PA100 Laser Heads. Two Eurovac III systems assure clean air and dust control in the shop, especially necessary now that the facility sprays only waterborne paint.
The paint shop is equally well equipped with five Blowtherm spray booths, seven Blowtherm Downdraft prep stations, and two Blowtherm Downdraft mixing rooms. Longo Toyota CRC has completed its conversion to the PPG Envirobase waterborne system.
Careful Planning Pays Off
Romero addressed the detailed plan they followed to convert to waterborne. “We did contemplate changing paint manufacturers. But after trying some other paints, current supplier PPG was deemed to have the best system to offer for our environment. There was nothing out there that would cause us to disrupt our relationship with PPG which spans 20 plus years.
“Our shop was already equipped with Blowtherm paint booths. We shopped for over a year and a half for an airflow system, trying everything from JUNair to SATA jets to the AdvanceCure from Global, which we ultimately purchased. The AdvanceCure accelerated air flow system had several advantages that were important to us. First of all, it has less moving parts with less room for mechanical breakdown compared to competitors. Another advantage is that the system pulls heated cabin air. By using 100% cabin air the same temperature as the booth increases air flow dramatically.
After that decision was made, Romero sat down with Finishmaster’s Rob Lacerte, PPG’s Scott Smith, and Max Hirsch from Global to coordinate a changeover without disrupting the business. Hirsch worked out the whole paint booth conversion. Longo Toyota CRC began preparing for the transition over a year ago by changing paint lines from DBU to DBC. Prepping for the DBC system is compatible with waterborne.
The transition to waterborne spurred the facility to improve some of its operating procedures. It was imperative that sand and dirt be nowhere near the paint booth. Prepping and masking had to be done 100% correctly.
“We wanted to follow the manufacturer’s instructions ‘to a T’ so the shop and its techs wouldn’t be the reason for any failure. We converted with the best system we could find, so we wanted the product to perform on its own without any outside influences.” The change took place cold turkey. First, all the booth equipment was converted. The next step wasto take the whole paint staff and managers to spend a day at the PPG training center. Romero encouraged his painters to try to make the system fail to figure out what was likely to go wrong before it happened in real-life situations. The whole transition took place in 21 days. According to Romero, the conversion went better than expected. A lot of preparation went into the process ahead of time —meetings, coordination, putting equipment in place.
“Finishmaster and PPG provided many technical paint representatives to remain in the shop until we were acclimated. They worked one-on-one with the painters and preppers over the course of two weeks and in the third week, were available to the whole paint team. Support from Finishmaster, PPG and Global was an integral key to our success. Even knowing what I know now, we could not have made the transition go any smoother than it did.”
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