As vehicle manufacturers continue to use colour as a key selling point, is the refinish system you have chosen up to the colour challenge now and into the future?
Mainstream vehicle brands have gotten more adventurous with colour because it’s all about selling more cars. While this is great for OEMs, all the average bodyshop cares about is ‘do I have the tools to efficiently and effectively refinish one of these colours when it rolls through the door’? It’s here that some people still believe refinish systems are all pretty much the same. However, the constant arrival of exotic vehicle colours (think Ford Ruby Red, Subaru’s K7X WR Blue and Mazda 46V Soul Red Crystal and 46G Machine Grey) has shown it’s not the case. Some paint brands struggle to match exotic colours, while others require extra process time in order to achieve a match. The insurance company ‘paint rate’ for the job does not take into account whether your paint system is fast or slow. Therefore, even if you are not running a high volume bodyshop, you can’t afford inefficient colour capability eating into your profitability.
One of the key strengths of the PROTEC® and MAXMAYER® brands is that they fall under the PPG banner. ‘Colour’ is highly valued at PPG and this flows right from the OEM level, directly to users of the company’s refinish brands. As the world’s largest maker of transportation coatings, PPG has strong links to vehicle OEMs around the globe. As well as supplying a large percentage of the world’s vehicle makers with products (from e-coat and primer to basecoat colours and clearcoat), PPG’s R&D Teams actually work in conjunction with OEM personnel to develop new colours, pigment technologies and application techniques. As a result, when OEMs introduce them, PPG is typically able to access advanced information which assists in providing a refinish formulation and, if necessary, a repair process before it’s actually seen on the road.
In addition, PPG operates a worldwide network of colour laboratories specifically to support colour in each region. The colour labs constantly feed data into a central database which is shared across PPG’s global network. Whether it’s an exotic new colour or a variant or special, these resources are all about keeping colour up-to-date. The net result is that bodyshop operators have the opportunity to save considerable time and energy simply by choosing a refinish system with strong colour capabilities, such as Protec’s PARAGLAZE® paint system or the AQUAMAX® Extra waterborne basecoat system from MaxMeyer.
Sooner or later, one of today’s exotic new colours, or perhaps one that is set to be released in the future, will arrive in your bodyshop. Therefore, you need to have the colour capability in place (colour data, tinters, a spectrophotometer and the painter’s own colour library) to meet every colour challenge and deal with it as quickly as possible. These days, you just don’t have time for anything else!