By: Jeremy Winters
When it comes time to look at purchasing a booth for your shop, there are many things to consider. How many cars are you planning on painting each day? Each week? Each month? What kind of paint are you going to be using? Are you looking to add another booth to your fleet or are you starting out with your first? While opening a catalog and buying the lowest cost option sounds like a good plan, I assure you that there are other, much better options. Let’s dive into a few other questions and things you need to consider before making your purchase.
The biggest thing to stress to anyone purchasing a booth is summed up with one key word: SUPPORT. We all know that having new tools are nice, but in the life of a shop we all know that the real question is not if something will break, but when will it break. And when that break happens, are you going to have the support you need from the manufacturer? While things can seem like a cheaper and better investment up front, is it really better if the company doesn’t come through when things go wrong? What are the availability of parts? How quickly can issues be diagnosed and parts be swapped out? What if the problem is a motor or a major component and not something as simple as a switch or connector? If it’s a “show-stopper” problem, how long are you going to be down?
I realize that these are technically a bunch of hypotheticals here, however, they come from a genuine place with me. Every minute the booth isn’t running, the shop isn’t making money. If you add up the costs of what’s not getting through the booth, that particular day or week and can quickly ramp up into the thousands. How much “bargain” are you really getting now? I ask you to consider this point of SUPPORT because I, as a painter of nearly 20 years, have been in that exact position. I once had a line of cars going through the entire paint shop and I had a booth shut down for unknown reasons. The booth repair company couldn’t diagnose over the phone and couldn’t get out to the shop for a couple of days. Once they did, they couldn’t source the proper parts so I was down for nearly 2 weeks just for a simple part on a damper. We were lucky in the fact that we had 2 booths and the other was operational, but production got cut in half and EVERYONE in the shop suffered. Paint shop got backed up, bodyshop couldn’t reassemble vehicles, vehicles couldn’t be delivered, shop couldn’t get paid on those cars… and so on.
Think of what that cost the shop. Now, think if that was your shop. Would that fly?
SUPPORT comes in many parts of this industry. When you are having issues with your paint, you expect your paint company to offer some kind of support and help figure out the problem. When your spray guns aren’t spraying right even after everything has been broken apart and cleaned 3 times over, you expect some support in figuring out what’s going on with them. Why are paint booths, one of the single biggest investments you will make for your shop, any different? At Accudraft, we have a service team that specializes in paint booths, and not just Accudraft paint booths. They know their stuff and can fix just about any system out there. Being able to talk to a team that knows everything about paint booths means that you get parts, service, and expert service right away. From the moment we pick up the phone, we’re focused on getting you up and running. Period.
At Accudraft, we have booths to fit any application you need from basic to custom, along with the crew to help maintain them. From our economic Pro-Series, to the high production units like the SS, Italia, and Titan paint booths. Reach out to Accudraft to see what makes our SUPPORT the best in the industry.
