Tales from the Road

Tales from the Road

As the Print and Panel awards judges toured smash shops all over Australia, they came upon the unusual, the clever and the funny. These are some of the tales from those they collected.

Water Water everywhere
What does a young repairer do when taking over a small shop from a retired former owner? Wait and see how the land lies before making changes? No, not in the case of Craig Urleigh, anyway. He's gone straight into Spies Hecker waterborne base coat in the belief that this is the way of the future so why not be a leader rather than a follower. He'll be looking to train his apprentices and young technicians in waterborne skills before they become embedded in using solvent paints.

Store within the shop
If you never want to run out of consumables and there is complete trust between you and your supplier, ask him to place stocks of his goods in a cage in your repair shop. It works for Hadwen's in Brisbane. The 'bond stored' stock is checked every day by the supplier and replenished. As selected employees take goods from the locked cage they note detailson a whiteboard outside.

Kit's humour
Is this a television showing a program about fish or a fish pond turned into a television or a television turned into a fish pond? Ask Kit Anderson who built it. We're not sure.

Don't eat them!
Can you guess what they are? They are plastic buttons used in paintless dent removal (PDR) by Pro Dent in Brisbane. Special glue attaches a button to the middle of a dent and a slid hammer is used, with great care, to pull it up. The method of pulling rather then pushing has extended the scope of PDR considerably.

Colourful character
Meet Lauren Fotheringham, a star performer at Kits Crash Repairs in Brisbane. At 23 she is not only one of the shop's best painters but is an outstanding colour matcher as well.

Fall-out
Did this enging just fall out of the car when it was lifted on a hoist> It looks that way but Steve Vella of Heidelberg Accident Repairs in Melbourne assured us it had been carefully unbolted.

Puzzle solution
Wayne Phipps, the WA large shop winner in this years bodyshop awards, is one of the most innovative promoters in the business. When a car is in the shop for more than two days, Phipps takes a
More of Kit's work
If Kit Anderson wasting his time with a smash reapir shop? When you look at the cash regiser he restored and the giant Korek style floor pulling system he designed and built, you do wonder.

The big Q question
Repairers all over Australia and particularly in Queensland, who are wrestling with the water shortage, also wrestling with painfully unco-operative councils who dither over granting permission to harvest roof water for car washing.

Best panel shop?
Is this Australia's best panel shop? It is Eastside Collision in Brisbane, backed by AAMI, run by Walter Evans with the help of Roy Taylor from Auto-tek Consulting. Entry is strictly limited, but those who have seen inside say it is stunning. On the other hand there are rumors that the facility is a demanding place to work and there are staff shortages Ð but that is a common problem all over Australia.
While Evans owns the shop, there is clearly an agreement with AAMI on the supply of work.
One of the interesting points to leak out is that there is a new prep and booth set-up developed by John Milton's Monarch group in Adelaide.
One highly placed Sydney supplier who has seen inside the shop says that, without doubt it is the best in Australia and one of the best in the world.

Hadwen history
The winner of the best large shop in Queensland, Hadwen's in Bowen Hills, put out a stunning brochure to celebrate its 75 years in business. Below a Brisbane City Hall was officially opened, Amy Johnson became the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Asutralia, Don Bradman broke the world record for an individual first class score with 425 not out, Phar Lap won the Melbourne Cup, the two arches of the Sydney Harbour Bridge were joined and Australia and Britain were linked by radio telephone.

Snap chap
Editor Fraser McEwing braves the chill of Melbourne as he fearlessly takes a photograph of himself taking a photograph of himself. If you can work that out.

In-joke
A spray painter asks "What's more useless than tits on a bull?" And then answers his own question with "a hammer in the hand of a panel beater".

Chair
According to Bryson Shafer, this chair is one of the best pieces of equipment in his already well equipped panel shop. It saves backs, holds tools and moves speedily.

Scales of justice
This is more than a weighing machine for paint. It is also a computer. Made by Connex, it can be used for paint stock control and to calculate exactly how much paint is being used per job, or per week or per month.

Bring the busses
Jerry Yahya is not just the owner of Vision Panels in Artarmon (NSW), but an activist for better public transport in one of Sydney's most condensed smash repair areas. One of the major problems in Artarmon is a lack of parking space. Technicians must drive to work because there is no bus services into the area. But not for long, Yahya says. He and a small band of like minded repairers have been lobbying the local council and chamber of commerce to include Artarmon in where the bus driver goes.

Following up
Greg and Jennifer Gearing own a successful and growing smash repair business in Cessnock in country NSW. One of their outstanding practices is in customer follow-up. After every job, a survey is sent to rate the shop's performance. Initially, it was difficult to get people to return the surveys. But now the return rate is over 90 per cent. Why? Because the company began sending out the surveys with a stamped, self addressed envelope and a small gift. Each returned survey goes into a draw for a clean and detail.
The Gearings have learned from their survey results, one of which is to tell the customer exactly what the repair entails.

Super Sprayman
It's not a bird or a plane or a real man, but Wayne Phipps whimsical art work above his repair shop in Perth.

Sign language
An idea to keep the shop tidy.

Dog's life
"Yum, feed me another assessor."

Unintentional
SA Crash is Adelaide is run by the affable Bonifazi, a past winner of a Paint & panel award and probably a future one. But an Adelaide hurricane had no respect for the shop when it tore off one of the letters of its name. When we took this
Walk the walk
Dynamic Paint N Panel in Adelaide supplies its staff with polo shirts with the company name on the front and its services on the back. Owner Cos Condo says its amazing how often his boys are asked for a business card when people, maybe at the pub, read the back of the shirt.

When Harry met Sally
It isn't often that you see the two side of a collision in the one shop, but it happened At Cole Motor Smash Repairs at Henley Beach in Adelaide. Because the company has its own towing service, it collected both these Falcons when they hit each other. The older one (left) came off worse than the newer one (right). Both drivers went to hospital but were not seriously injured.

Best wash bay
By far the best wash bay we've seen so far is at SA Crash in Adelaide. We couldn't fault it.

Super tool
Cos Condo of Dynamic Paint N Panel in Adelaide says this double push ram is one of the best tools in his shop. Battery powered, it can get into small spaces and give a mighty push in either direction.

Taking a tilt
We'd seen them at the trade shows but this was the first time we'd seen one at work in a shop. This ild machine is ideal for lifting the side of the car when there's work to do in the sills or bottoms of the guards. It enables the technician to see exactly what he's doing as well as saving strain on his back.

Boom or bust
When the new spray booth went in nobody had thought to make sure that the boom arm delivering overhead power and air had enough room to unfold and swing around. It didn't.

Right reading?
Shouldn't this read 'insecurity'?

Water saver
There was hardly enough room for ouf photographer to squeeze up between Ultra finish's building and boundary fence, but when he did, there was one answer to the water shortage: a row of tanks, filled from roof water, to enable legal car washing.