I don’t actually know how it is done now and whether there are any clever tools involved. But I have heard that it costs money :eek:
So if we wanted to run a “sure I can paint this car” type of business without relying purely on lower wages for the same work as the main competitive advantage, what could we do? Are there some operations that could naturally be handled using a mechanical tool that are now not so done? Or could the task be made a lot easier to master by using better division of labor, so that a bunch of unskilled high school kids could be drilled to do some standard operation (“paint the bumper of type 5”) and then they would just work on it in conveyor fashion?
Or could we make a three dimensional printer with a nozzle that would basically scan around the car according to its standard shape and spray it with the paint?
No. We have nowhere near the robot technology available to paint any type of car. It would be difficult to do so for one type of car. Painting an assembled car requires art and skill. It also requires prepping the car. Paint can’t be sprayed through trim pieces which have to be removed, or around them unless they are masked. Most cars should have blemishes and rust repaired before painting, and most that need painting are in much worse shape. All this applies to quality paint jobs. What you describe is already done for low end paint jobs. Minimally skilled workers prep the car, removing old paint, masking trim, lights, windows, etc… One guy sprays primer, then paint, coating everything still exposed. These guys are likely to be paid by the job, or do other work for the business most of the time. It couldn’t get cheaper than that.
Also, it is not possible to drill a bunch of unskilled high school kids to do some standard operation.
It’s done after the old paint is removed. To my knowledge, and to what I would consider a quality paint job, the old paint is always removed.
If you haven’t caught on yet, the majority of the work involved is in prepping before painting. You might get an expensive, high maintenance, robot to do a decent paint job on a properly prepped car. But the prepping has to be done first, and then when you’re done painting and drying, everything prepped has to be unprepped. If you took it off, you have to put it back on. And guess what, not everything that comes off goes back on. You may have to replace trim, and/or use a different way of attaching it. I don’t think a robot could perform any of the tasks involved except for the painting. And it definitely couldn’t do that for less cost than a professional car painter.
Auto assembly plants do use robotic paint equipment, but it works for them because they are painting the same type of car over and over and over; not to mention actually applying the very first coat of paint that car has ever had… Like any CNC industrial process, you have to tailor the programming to the specific car body, and the specific pattern used to lay down the paint has to be developed and refined (when you hear talk of an assembly plant being “retooled,” this is one of the things they mean.)
For a generic paint shop, I don’t think it would be feasible or affordable to try to do this for the wide variety of vehicles you’d be dealing with.
More importantly, they’re just painting parts and the chassis/frame, so no faffing around with hours of taping/covering things you don’t want paint on.
is this covering up things a big issue, in terms of expenditure of time and money, in the way that paint jobs are done normally outside the factory? Or is it only an issue in a particular category of paint jobs, such as the “cheap paint job”, whereas in other categories this is not an issue?
The taping and prepping people are taking about if for a car that having been driven for a while gets into an accident or the paint has deteriorated and the owner wants the car repainted so it looks nice and doesn’t corrode. New cars the body work is painted before things like seats windows engines etc. are installed. New car painting is heavily automated.
So taping is a non-trivial task that is routinely done in the paint jobs, and hence is potentially an area to try to get things done more productively, if we want to do paint jobs faster.
So what is “prepping”? And is that related to the removal of blemishes and rust, the specifics of which I asked about upthread?
Well, that’s part of it. You can’t just paint over rust, it’ll keep rusting because iron is an asshole. If you’re repainting a car, you have to grind down any existing rust, fill any resulting holes, reprime any bare metal, scour the existing paint so the new coat will have something to “grab” on to, then tape off molding and trim that you don’t want painted.
Is the filling of the holes the most high skilled activity here? Or is operating the tool for grinding rust and remove existing paint also a complex thing?
In fact, what limits the productivity on the grinding operation? E.g. what determines the maximum area that the grinding tool can cover at one time? What would happen if we were to try make that tool four times bigger?
Old paint is rarely if ever removed before painting. Complete removal of the paint would require the dis assembly of the car and dipping into vat of paint remover (did that with a race car we were building once) Paint may be removed in a local area where a repair is needed to be made, other that that the paint will be prepped and painted over.
Car makers publish warranty guides where they tell dealers what they will pay for various mechanical repairs. Flip the book to body repairs and it is blank. This is because body and paint work is considered artisan work, work done by skilled craftsmen, and not holdable to rigid time schedule.
A fender on one car might take an hour to prep for paint, the same fender on another example of the same model car might take 4 hours.
-Rick
Who is damn glad he does not do paint and body work
What? This is not about a repair, but about repainting a car. The old paint is removed by sanding and sometimes brush on strippers. I’m not claiming to know everything about car painting, but I’ve never heard of painting over old paint for anything that would be considered a long lasting finish. At a mininum the entire surface would have to be sanded to get an even finish, and a primer applied that would adhere to the old paint. Please tell me what I’ve missed about this.
It’s probably worth your while to go down to your local library and look through some car repair/car repainting books. These should give you a good idea of what’s involved in repainting a car.
Then you may be unable to work on smaller detail areas. On some cars, the fenders look like someone just draped sheet metal over a roundish form and there’s no corners, creases or angles. Now if you wind up facing something like a BMW X6, you’ve got all kinds of madness to work with. If your tool is too big, you won’t be able to get into that area under the crease, and if you work on the crease too hard, you’ll round it off.
There are car painting shops where the painting almost could be automated. Places like Maaco and Earl Scheib are not known for quality jobs. I’ve seen their work, and it can look like someone taped over the trim and masked the windows, tires and tail lights, then just blasted away with a spray gun.
are the larger areas grinded using a tool with bigger surface area than those small details areas?
Do the small details areas take up the most time and effort during this operation?
You mention the BMW as an example of a car with lots of small details, but is this also an issue for the cheaper, more popular cars like Toyota and Hyundai? Or is painting those cars much simpler because of lack of the small details?
Robots excel at repetitive work, meaning that they do exactly the same thing over and over and over again. Clearly they account for variety, but “variety” means a four-door versus a five-door model. In an industrial paint shop, every car will already have its metal work (if needed, coming out of the body shop) complete, done primarily by human craftsmen (sometimes robots will do the rough stuff, but it’s for predictable rough stuff).
You can’t even get Photoshop to completely and perfectly repaint a car in one step. Forget about machinery doing so.
I used to work for Maaco years ago. Basic prep included masking/taping, general sanding for adhesion and some extra sanding for larger chips. We gave everything that came in a separate estimate for bodywork (rust, dents, etc.).
Was there a difference between us and a regular bodyshop? Of course. We were a production shop with above average monkeys working the prep line and a really good team of painters in the booth. Owner was good too (since Maaco is a franchise, YMMV), and made sure the prep line was run tightly–complaints about overspray were worse than making sure the line knew what it was doing.
Anyway, I worked in estimates and the commercial side of things. Was someone going to pay more than $500 to paint their '82 Corolla? Of course not. But we could give the last two to five years of its life a great look. Paint over rust? Are you sure? It can be done, the rust will come right through in a very short time, but the car will still look a hundred times better than it did then. The only thing that was overly problematic was cars that needed stripping due to peeling paint (looking at you, GM). Other than that, if you’ll forgive a bit of sexism, it was like putting makeup on an ugly girl. Is she still going to be ugly when she comes out of the booth? Sure. But will she look just that much better? Yep. We could–and did–$2,000 to $5,000 jobs and they were great. But the majority of our business was lower-end, the type of things you could get by with just about everyone up to the painter being a half-step above moron (hey look, they had me working there).
If you’re only painting a small area (say, fistsized), you can prep and paint that area and clearcoat the rest of the panel. But much larger than that and you’re prepping and removing all the paint and painting the whole panel. “Removing” is just sanding/grinding down to bare metal.
I dont recall who publishes them, but there are rigid guidelines for body work. There may be more flexibility, especially if used parts are used because they often need minor repairs before painting. Since most repairs are paid for by insurance, the bodyshop has to call them and ask them to pay more time on troublesome repairs. If they refuse, the technician or the customer often end up getting screwed.
