National Corvette Museum: Sinkhole Collapses

One of the things about living in Kentucky is every once in a while you get new sinkholes. If you happen to be the National Corvette Museum you can lose stuff like 8 Corvettes!

National Corvette Museum: Sinkhole Collapses at National Corvette Museum: We received a call at 5:44am from our security company alerting us of our motion detectors going off in our Skydome area of the Museum. Up...


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Massive Paint Shortages at House of Kolor

For many of us painting cars and motorcycles is not an occupation it's a hobby. We are not looking to paint a fender on a 2002 Buick we are looking to do a custom paint job, something special something out of the ordinary. And to be fair this is a very small slice of the automotive paint business. And the automotive paint business is a very small slice of the coatings business that said it is a very important slice of the business, and for many of us the most fun slice.
The Big name in the custom paint business is House of Kolor a division of  The Valspar Corporation.Valspar is not a small company it has more than 9,000 employees with a market cap of more than 4Billion US$, not a BASF or DuPont to be sure but Big Industry. A former Valspar employee told me this week that House of Kolor is one of the highest margin divisions of the company.

As a paint retailer we sell the most custom paint right at this time of year. Springtime we want to fix up the Harley for the open road or do that custom paint job on the '56 Chevy.
In a letter to House of Kolor customers from Nick Dahl, House of Kolor General Manager, addresses the Stock Shortages. He blames the inventory shortfalls on supply chain shortfalls and inventory shortfalls from his suppliers.
Looking at the HOK master stock list there are 150 items that are "temporarily out of stock" the list includes primers and sealers, the new DTM colored surfacers and sealers, all of the solid base coats, most of the  Glamour Basecoats (BC) most of the Fine Basecoats (FBC), most of the Kandy Basecoats  (KBC), many of the Urethane Kandys (UK) and the Kandy Koncentrates (KK). There are also major shortages in the Graphic Kolors (SG) and the Designer Pearls (PBC) also the Kosmic Krome (MC), and the Marbizers.
To be fair they say they will have most of these problems cleared up by late May.
They also are discontinuing many products almost the whole Metajuls line (MBC) I never even got to try that line. They are discontinuing the airbrush size items and about 50 other items.
Is there any one out there to come in and pick up the slack? This could be the best time for a new Custom Paint Company to come forward.      

 
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Now here is a good idea 5Star has printed a QR on the label of their new 5062 bodyfiller. Simply pull out your smart phone scan the code and the web page with the Technical Data Sheet and the MSDS are available on your phone. the link takes you to http://5starxtreme.com/msds-tds/5062.aspx

I like the implementation the page is free of images that would slow the loading of the page on mobile devises and with out the distraction of of up sell or advertising.

Nicely done I hope this is adopted industry wide.







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EPA regualtions Paint Coatings and Paint Stripping

Things creep up on you. You know it's coming but it's complicated of a long way off so you decide to just think about it later then it's time. Well it's time. The National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants is now in effect the part that effects us as painters is subpart HHHHHH or NESHAP.

http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/area/paint_stripb.pdf

Some background

The rules have been in development since 2002 they cover a large number of industries including cement manufacturing, the oil and gasoline industry, municipal and medical incinerators, asbestos production, the glass and ceramics industry, the list goes on . The final rules went into effect January 9 2009. The compliance date is January 10 2010 .

What do the rules cover

• The rules cover automotive paint spraying
  
• the use of paint stripping using methylene chloride
• the use of paints containing the heavy metals lead, chrome, mercury, manganese, nickel or cadmium at reportable levels

Who does this affect

If you paint cars buses, trucks, trailers, motorcycles, boats, tractors, engines car parts you can figure it applies to you for a complete list see http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/area/fr09ja08.pdf

There is a significant exception if you are a hobbyist or a restorer or are repairing your own car you can paint up to 2 cars a year

What it takes to be compliant

You must use hvlp guns or the equivalent kind of guns and protective clothing. You must have compliant spray booths with filter technology with a 98% capture efficiency. Spray gun cleaning must be contained so that solvents are captured. All painters must be certified within the past 5 years. One of the main targets of these rules is to minimize the use of strippers containing MeCl your annual usage should not exceed 181 gallons and you must keep records of your use of stripper.

The final part is you must register with your area EPA office. Please do not take this as a definitive document on the subject DO YOUR OWN RESERCH but here is a warning get compliant and do it before they come knocking on your door. When you register they will come and check you out. If you have better information than I do please post it in the comments and I will correct this as new information becomes available to me

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Goodbye Geocities

I heard that Yahoo is shutting down GeoCities this week. Back in 1999 Geocities was one of two or three places you could put up a free website. Good bye Geocities good bye The Paint Professor. Anyone recognize the Professor? I was trying for my dear friend the late Jim Wallen.

Here is a screenshot I took today

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Matrix MPB-9000 Black

Here at Allen Paint we sell Sherwin Williams Ultra 7000 as our premier line. The Ultra 7000 is the basecoat I recommend for exact matches on newer cars it is excellent paint and I love it. It is not cheap but for exact matches stands up to any paint line. For complete paint jobs we sell Sherwin's economy line Dimension not designed for matching but it's pretty close in most colors. One of the places it falls down is black. It just isn't deep enough it always looks just a little brown. Kinda disappointing
We do however Have 2 other lines of paint Matrix and Wanda.
Today I would like to tell you about the Matrix MPB-9000 this is a factory black base coat that is deep and dark and rich and very very black. That and it's reasonably priced we sell it for 128.95 a gallon. We also pour off quarts pints and half pints.
That said it is not really suitable for matching I looked up some formulas this morning Dodge PX8 has a little bit of yellow oxide and a little white. Ford UA black was similar. Mercedes Benz uses a little blue the point is this not for matching but if your painting a complete this is the ticket.



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What is the right gun to use?

This post comes in response to to a readers question. Donald Butler from Houston is restoring a Jeep and keeps a video blog of his progress.
Donald asked what is the best gun for doing a metallic finish for a base coat clear coat paint job?
In an ideal world I would like a whole arsenal of guns. I would like a 1.4 HVLP gun for base coat and a 1.3 RP (reduced pressure non hvlp for the clear), a 1.8 for urethane primer a 2.2 for those times when I need to use a polyester primer and a detail gun for shooting smaller projects and doorjambs.
The 1.4 HVLP gives the best color match and the 1.3(or smaller) RP lays down the clear the best. Primer guns need a larger oriface to lay down the heavier material.
Alas I can't afford all of them. I get by with a 1.4 HVLP for both base and clear a 1.0 detail gun and a 1.8 primer gun
There have been manufactures over the years that have made guns with interchangable air caps and I've tried a couple and have never been very impressed. They are compromises and just don't seem to work out well. To do it right youo would have ot change out the air cap, fluid nozzle and needle. Doing that you've probubly spent enough money to buy a new gun.
By far the most important thing is to match your gun to your compressor. This is about air consumption. Guns need a critical volume of air to operate correctly if you spend a lot of money on a good gun that requires 13CFM (cubic feet per minute) to operate and your compressor can only deliver 8 CFM it will not operate correctly and you will be disappointed.




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Invisible Car

This from Telegraph.co.uk Art student Sara Watson a 22-year-old student at the University of Central Lancashire spray painted a battered Skoda Fabia to match the car park and entrance to her art studio.
Visit the Telegraph site for other views of the car






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Tips for using bodyfiller

Polyester body filler, Bondo, (a registered trade mark that has taken on the generic title)  pasta, or just plastic filler, call it what you want we all use it. There are economy fillers, premium fillers the fine folks at USC U. S. Chemicals & Plastics  have given use a list of tips to better body filler

• Outdated hardener is the #1 cause of problems. DO NOT use hardener over 1 year old
• Do Not over catalyze 
• Always knead the cream hardener tube prior to use
• Do Not whip body filler
• Do Not put filler on paint shaker
• Using coarse grit abrasives like 24 & 36 grit wastes time material and slows production use 80 grit and you will have a better job with fewer pinholes
• Apply thin layers using a flat spreader working the filler into the scratches to promote adhesion and force out air 

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Pearl Paint

 When asked for advise about pearl paint the first thing I have to do is narrow down what kind of pearl we are talking about. There are three kinds of pearl paint jobs. Pearl is an ingredient used in automotive paint. Pearls are used to add a sparkle to paint much like metallic. There are dozens of colors available dark and light blues, greens, golds, and reds but also slivers and bronze and copper.

 Automotive manufactures will use just a pinch or 3 or more different pearls to add life to the paint. With modern base coat systems pearl coat will lay down as nice as solid colors. One note of caution the more coats of pearl you put on the darker the color gets. So when doing a repair leave a panel open so you don't put more coats on than necessary to achieve the color you are after. 

The second use of pearl is on thi stage paint jobs like the Cadillac or Lexis white pearls. These involve a white ground coat then a pearl mid coat then a clear coat. Once again it's critical that you have the same number of coats on the whole project.

 The third kind of pearl is used in custom painting to give a color shift for instance a white car with blue pearl mixed into the second coat of clear. I don't mix it into the first coat because I want the pearl to be suspended above the base. I fog on this coat then clean my gun and mix up some more clear to give it a couple more coats. SEM makes eight nice liquid pearls and Old School Flake makes about 20 powder pearls. How much to use? Well that's an artistic decision, I shoot a lot of test panels and take the panels out into the sun before I decide how much to use on the car or bike I'm painting.

 

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Hard times for some opportunity for others

These can be hard times for paint stores.  These can be hard times for your customers, especially if your customers are big body shops at the dealership level. These can also be times of great opportunity. There are plenty of small shops that have had no slow down in their business at all. 

I have given this quite a bit of thought for the paint store owner and the paint store counter men and women, you need to take more time slow down and give the small shop owner and the backyard warrior more service. In the end it's better to have 40 small shops than 8 big ones.

For the shop owner you need to be more agile I was talking to one of my customers today. Al of Exclusive Image here in Denver and he has been having a good no a very good winter. He does some dealer work, some rental car work and complete paint jobs on higher end cars;  Bmw's Mercedes, Chrysler 300s. He sets his customers up with custom tires and rims and really treats them right. He's honest, detail oriented and doesn't cut corners it has a given him a great word of mouth following.    

 

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Miles per Gallon

Thinking about getting a new car? And you want a more economical one right? It turns out that looking at the MPG (miles per gallon) is more complicated then you would guess.

Rick Larrick and Jack Soll of Duke University explain it all at The MPG Illusion

Which is more useful to know: How far you can drive on a gallon of gas? Or, how much gas you will use while owning a car?

MPG answers the first question. GPM answers the second question. We suspect that, when buying a car, most people want to know gas consumption. Gas consumption, as measured by GPM, can be directly translated to the cost of driving the car and to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. MPG cannot.

MPG can be a misleading measure of fuel economy when comparing two cars. 

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Planet Color Update

A couple of months a ago I complained that I was out of the loop with the Sherwin Williams Planet Color system. Well I'm happy to say that my local SW rep took care of us and we have the snazzy fold out color display. We can make all of the colors and some of them are fabulous.
I always thought that thinking up names for colors would be a great job and these guys have some good ones click on the products tab to see the Sinister colors like Black Magic and Golden Violet. Click on Classic Muscle to see Dick Balsley Blue, or Gene Winfield Red, or Jon Moss Yellow. Dick Balsley a GM engineer that is Manager of Special Fleet at The GM Heritage Center. Gene Winfield is a custom car builder from Mojave California. And hot rodder and GM designer Jon Moss. Other great names are fitynine caddy, fritz the cat green and Stan Betz yellow. honoring Stan Betz of Betz Speed and Color. As for fritz the cat you may have to find some one that remembers a the late 60's to understand that one.
Great idea honoring these giants with cool colors



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Sherwin Willams HP process

Sherwin Williams has posted a preview of their new web site design very clean very web2.o

The web 2.0 part? Well they are calling it the beta site and they are posting videos to Youtube
I've just finished watching an eight minute video on the new HP process.
This is quite remarkable stuff very very fast curing at 75 degrees Fahrenheit prime, sand, paint,clear and buff all in 15 minutes. No bake cycle no ultra violet lights all at room temrerature. If you run a production shop you should take a look at this







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Electic Cars in Americas Future

The news today revolves around a multibillion dollar bailout of the Big Three auto makers. I'm not sure where to come down on this on one hand we can't let millions of people to be thrown out of work, on the other is the management of these companies have resisted raising CAFE standards and suppressed new technologies. Are they going to embrace change and give us new highly efficient cars to break our dependence on Mideast oil. Or do they just give new gas guzzlers.

There are other car companies here in the United States that are making, well some are odd looking , but still innovative cars. If we are giving billions to the Big Three shouldn't the discussion include small innovative companies.

Here is a link to the Venture Beat Clean Tech blog post that has links to 30 companies making electric cars






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More on the return of Acme

A note on the return of the Acme Paint label. I heard a rumor that one of the reasons Sherwin Williams has resurrected the Acme is a mater of use it or loss it.
Sherwin folded Acme back into the product line back in 1996 and now 12 years later if they had not used the name they stood to lose the rights to the venerable old name. Back before Acme was associated with Willie E Coyote and his plans to get that pesky roadrunner Acme stood for the best of something, the name implied it was as good as it could be.
As a marketing tool Sherwin Williams used Acme to differentiate it's market along with other brands Rogers and Martin Senour. I always thought that Acme had the best numbering system


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Memo to SW we are not the competition

A customer came in the store the other day and with a very nice presentation book The Sherwin Williams Color Planet custom color book. It is a very nice book very cool colors much like PPG's Vibrance collection or Dupont's Hot Hues all interesting. All vying for that special niche market that House of Kolor has owned for years.
House of Kolor was started by Jon Kosmoski and made popular Kandy paint (Semi Transperent paint that is used over Metallics so the metallic sparkles through) HOK is owned by Valspar but they have recently brought Kosmoski back in to the company in a contributing capacity, they seemed to have been drifting for a long time.
The thing is about the Color Planet book, I had never seen one before and I sell Sherwin Williams automotive paint. We are and authorized jobber for SW and we buy form their company store here in town. But they treat us not so much as the competition but as the ugly step sister that "well we don't like to talk about don't-you-know."
It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. In trying to keep all of the sales to them selves they keep it from being viewed by a larger market.



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Acme Returns not with out problems

I got to work this morning to find a new product on the shelf. Sherwin Williams has brought back the Acme label. When I first started in the paint business the store that I worked for sold Acme and aside for some snickers about the name association with Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner it was a widely loved product.
Like a lot of big companies SW markets it's products under lots of trade names but in 1996 SW folded Acme into the Sherwin Williams, I remember the binder we received "Combining Our Mix in 96" Now it's back.
Down to practice maters I looked on the gallon cans of acrylic enamel to see the mix ratio you know so I could tell my customers how to use it. THERE ARE NO MIXING INSTRUCTIONS ON THE CAN! I hate this why, didn't the know when they made the label or is the information secret. But undeterred I went to the website that contained the PDS (product data sheets) www.acmefinishes.com sounds good I'm pretty handy with the keyboard and all. The web site does not exsist it redirets you to http://www.paintdocs.com/msds/ and there are noPDS on the site. Come on Sherwin Williams you can do better than this.


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The evolution of Car Logos

Thanks to Karen Taylor for the link to this story on Neatorama an exhaustive look at how car logos have changed over the years




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Gunslinger Flake Job part 1

Sorry for not having posted for so long, I broke my arm and that slowed me up for a while.
I went to visit a fabulous shop this week, Gunslinger Custom Paint in Golden Colorado. I would love to share some photos with you but they asked me not to take any pictures and of course I complied.
I went out there specifically because they completely flacked a custom motorcycle. They used the Old School Flake F-19 Chrome .064 this is the largest size OSF makes and in the sunlight it was dazzling the next step for this project will be to candy over it and I hope to have photos of it as a completed project to share.



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