Wednesday, 27 January 2010 22:48

(continued from page 1)

Next we move into the shop were the theory gets put into play. We have an extremely well kept tile floor, state of the art equiptment and one heck of a nice paint booth...well one and a half, they have a sorta parts cut-in style room off to the side. Most lights are off today since this class didn't require any work out here.

And we have the monster here, it takes all the abuse we can throw at it. I remember practicing spot repair and testing new products on this car before. Its on a dolly so it can be moved anywhere around the shop:

Now this contraption has always caught my eye. I had the pleasure of having a chemist come and explain it to me. It's a salt simulator that they use to test there coatings. You can see something inside of it now, DC92 caught my eye but I don't know the exact experiment here. They do use this center for more then just training, she explained they will sometimes test a new color in here for 1,500-3,000 hrs or more before approving it for a specific purpose. Sometimes  new OEM colors are testing through it and often released in higher UV area's such as Flordia or Arizona a few years prior to a full production. They mark a cross hatch before and perform adhesion tests after the cycle is finished. Here is the bad boy here:

That's about it. Courses typically run anywhere from 1-3 Days depending on what your going in for. I look forward to coming back for the Carrizma custom painting course but am informed I will have to wait until the waterborne version is released sometime in the near future.