Paint department efficiency improvement at your collision repair shop doesn’t mean spending more money on equipment, according to two 3M senior application engineers.

It comes down to better repair planning, daily scheduling, and maximizing booth space.

Jason Garfoot and John Ascheman taught a class on how to accomplish all of that as part of the Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS) Repairer Driven Education (RDE) at this year’s SEMA Show. Videos of sessions from last year are available to purchase at rde.scrs.com.

According to Jason Garfoot, the national average booth cycle per day average is three to four, and for more efficient shops five to six.

He said most shops average four booth cycles a day because the painting process takes almost the same amount of time regardless of how much is in the booth and dry times are consistent.

The following slow booth time:

• • Downtime
  • Masking
  • Moving parts around
  • Mixing paint
  • Contamination

The solution? Increase cycles per day by minimizing the processes that slow you down and shorten dry times; however, the latter is hard to do, Garfoot said.

Booth set up

Temperature for solvent-borne should be 70-75 degrees or the lowest ambient temperature possible if in a hotter area. A slow hardener and reducer should also be used.

“We never want to speed paint up chemically,” Garfoot said. “Paint has to dry at a certain rate to do what it’s supposed to do. Clear coat has to stay wet enough to link up the way it’s supposed to and flow out the way it’s supposed to. We have to give enough flash time in between coats.”

For water-borne, 75 degrees, or five to 10 degrees higher than the ambient temperature

“The reason we do that is we actually need to get some of that humidity out of the air and raise what our relative humidity can be,” Garfoot said.

John Ascheman

“I like to think of the booth and paint as a baking recipe, like you’re making cookies,” Garfoot said. “Let’s say you’re supposed to bake at 350. Is it faster and better to bake at 600? How are those cookies going to be?”

Ascheman added, “Your temperature inside the booth — what you actually feel — doesn’t change much. It just hurts you mentally because it’s already hot and you make it hotter. But realistically, inside the booth, everything still feels the same.”

Other tips shared include:

• • Cleaner paint jobs mean the more productive painters can be. No sanding in the booth.
  • Never bake sealer — if there’s any solvent left in that sealer, they can react.
  • Always look at the tech sheets from the paint company’s website; other sites may not update the sheets regularly.
  • Make sure booths run slightly positively pressured so dirt and contaminants are pushed out of the booth.
  • The booth should always be running when vehicles and/or parts are loaded to push dirt and contaminants away. A vacuum that does the opposite is created if the door is opened without the booth running.
  • Clean the booth regularly. Every day is best.
  • Use booth protection that can catch overspray — peel off or tack cloth that hangs on the wall.
  • Keep the booth and mix room doors shut. Helps keep them clean. It’s also a code violation to leave mix rooms open because of explosive paint fumes.
  • Use booth boxes for tape, tack rags, temperature gun, etc. instead of a table to help keep the booth clean.
  • Limit booth traffic.
  • Also always check OEM and paint manufacturer guidelines.

“Sealer starts the chemical adhesion process; it’s wet on wet,” Garfoot said. “If you look at the tech sheet, it’ll say you have to top coat this within so much time or you have to sand.”

Painters should also keep in mind that raw material shortages caused by the pandemic caused paint manufacturers to reformulate some of their products which could require different application processes, Garfoot said.

The best way to check the accuracy of the booth’s temperature is to put a panel close to the door, hit bake, and take a temperature reading every couple of minutes, Garfoot said.

Air speed

Air speed usually doesn’t fluctuate much as long as the booth is taken care of properly and the filters are changed every couple of months.

“Every paint company has requirements around the feet per minute of air moving over their products,” Garfoot said. “Feet per minute gets adjusted by whatever vehicle is loaded in the booth.”

He compared it to water coming out of a garden hose.

“We have the same amount of water coming out of this hose. If you put your thumb over the end, what happens to the speed of the water coming out? It speeds up,” Garfoot said.

“If you have a little booth and you put a huge van and a bunch of parts, that air speed is going to be creeping up. If you have a pretty empty booth and you throw a bumper in there, that air speed is going to be really low.”

Paint companies recommend between 80 and 120 feet per minute, he added.

Spray zone
“If you drew an imaginary line from your intake filters down to your exhaust filters, that’s our ideal area to spray,” Garfoot said. “Every booth is different… Exhaust pits have little trays in them… If you pull your filters out and you’re going to pull those trays out and clean them, take a picture and number them so you know where they go. There are different-sized holes in these so more and less blocked off. Those are used to balance the booth.

“One big step is center the vehicle over the pit as much as possible. You can slide it over to one side a little bit if you’re trying to get more parts in… Let’s say we were painting the driver’s side. We don’t want to see this right side way up against the wall.”

With a three-row pit, the wheels shouldn’t be off the pit, he added.

“When you shift a vehicle over that far, you throw off all the air in your booth; similar to how an airplane wing works,” Garfoot said.

PPE

“You should be fully covered head to toe, no exposed skin. I do like full-face respirators if you don’t have a fresh air supply,” Garfoot said. “A lot of people wear half masks. That’s fine. I’ve sprayed with those for years but I would recommend full-face if you can. Paint is nasty, nasty, dangerous stuff… Paint suits are cheap. They protect you, they protect the paint.”

Booth scheduling and planning

“As shops, we’ve always looked up repair plans, figured out how to section things, and how they go together,” Ascheman said. “Painters, we usually just mixed our colors and sprayed them and left it at the body techs. Now it’s a lot harder for us. The OEMs have position statements for everything, and painters need to start repair planning upfront.”

Especially important, he said, is to look up baking temperatures for electric vehicles because if not done correctly, the battery will be damaged.

Vehicles today also require proper paint thicknesses.

“Most people aren’t checking but if you do go over that, the calibration system won’t work,” Ascheman said. “Anything with ADAS or that has a position statement… if that person’s in an accident and they come back and you were at 7 mils instead of 6, you can now be liable for that. You’ve got to be mindful of all that stuff.”

According to some OEMs, if not done correctly, the part would have to be shredded at the cost of the shop for a new part, he added.

“They don’t want it going back in the market because it’s already got too much paint on it,” Ascheman said. “You have to shred it by doing at your cost to redo it. Insurance will not pay you to get a new one.”

Some OEMs also don’t allow repairs, for example on bumpers, and require replacement.

Other tips:

• • Plan four booth cycles but add a fifth to your daily schedules in case you have time for it.
  • Save big jobs for the end of the day because of how long it takes to tape. Plus, the vehicle won’t be reassembled on the same day anyway.
  • Try to average 12 hours per booth cycle — four to six booth cycles a day/48-72 refinish hours a day per booth/240-360 hours per week.
  • Look to add filler jobs whenever possible.
  • Separate solids and metallics as much as possible.
  • Group tricoats by themselves when possible.
  • Load the booth and/or staging area and build the next day’s schedule before you go home.

“Essentially, lay that out on the floor outside of the room so you can either tape it off, or some people will paint the floor and that’s their staging area,” Garfoot said. “The preppers should be loading that staging area with the next job… It helps you get more efficient and realize you might have more space than you think, or you might have done the opposite. Maybe you were too aggressive and everything’s not going to fit, or you’re gonna have to shuffle stuff around constantly to not get overspray on it.”

He shared an example of how painting vehicles off of vehicles can lead to 50% improved efficiency.

“If you’re not doing that currently, you can get there, believe it or not,” Garfoot said. “After the first couple weeks of working on new process stuff to get there, it just becomes second nature… Every day is fully planned out. Every booth cycle is planned out… Are you buying more products? Are you buying specialty equipment to do that? Are you hiring more people to do any of that stuff? No, you’re just changing a few processes.”

Just one more vehicle through the booth a week equals about $100,000 more gross profit a year and one more vehicle per day adds about $500,000 a year, he said.

“What a lot of people do in normal painting is they pull that vehicle in the booth and they put the door on a stand and bring it in so they can paint the inside and the outside of that door in one shot,” Garfoot said. “Then they’ll blend their fender and their rear door, and they’ll say, ‘We’re doing parts off — painting the doors off the vehicle.’ But that’s not true. Parts off painting is where you stack jobs and make a lot of money. We have this whole vehicle in the booth. How much of that vehicle are we working on?”

“When I was the painter at the shop I was at, I would give my body technicians an hour of my refinish time if they pulled blend panels off for me and put them back on and I would help them do it. It takes just a few minutes,” Garfoot said. “We now have all this extra space in the booth so we can bring in our same bumper job and maybe we can bring a hood fender job in also.”

Another option is to mask parts outside of the booth once they’re off the vehicle. That saves time and booth use by not having to bag the entire vehicle inside the booth, he added.

Images

Featured image: Jason Garfoot speaks during an SCRS Repairer Driven Education class at the 2024 SEMA Show. 

Slide images courtesy of 3M and SCRS