Today's episode, we have Danyon Kirchner, a Business Services Manager of Zimmerman Auto Body Supplies and C20 Refinish Moderator of Collision Hub as well.
Danyon, as a teenager in the late 90’s and early 2000’s he started hanging around some local body shops, and became intrigued with painting immediately. The fact that people could take a wrecked car, and make it look untouched, absolutely fascinated Danyon. He was literally that kid who wouldn’t leave the body shop, so they put him to work.
Danyon really wanted to be a lawyer or an accountant. He made the decision, however, to not take on college debt and spend the rest of his life paying for it. Since he had been working in the body shop during high school and absolutely loved all aspects, Danyon chose to pursue it as a career. His dad was still alive at the time and encouraged Danyon to do what he loved. He suggested Danyon go to Thaddeus Stevens College and get an affordable degree. It was the best move he ever made without question. Danyon’s dad owned a locally well-known sub shop up until his death, so family businesses mean more to him than most. In his heart, he always knew that he wanted to work for a family run business, as he firmly believes that they are the lifeblood of America. Before joining ZABS, Danyon was a ZABS customer. He was always impressed that whether he worked in a bigger shop or smaller shop, Danyon was treated with the same respect. He loves being part of a company with strong ethics and moral values.
The most accomplishment Danyon is most proud is right before joining Zimmerman’s in 2009, he spent a semester as a refinish instructor at Thaddeus Stevens. In his role now, Danyon get to see what some of his students have become. One of them opened his own shop, and several others have become high end technicians. It feels good to Danyon to know that he had a small part in that.
Danyon also works as a C20 Refinish Moderator at Collision Hub where he manages monthly meetings with collision centers from all over the US. He creates and presents information that is specifically designed for the paint shop, from full inventory control to in depth training on the art of color match. This virtual group allows painters from all over the country to learn, converge and be the best they can be in their field.
If you are interested in learning more about ClarityCoat, you can visit us here-
Website: https://claritycoat.com
Facebook: https://facebook.com/claritycoatofficial
Instagram: https://instagram.com/claritycoat_official
Today's episode, we have Danyon Kirchner, a Business Services Manager of Zimmerman Auto Body Supplies and C20 Refinish Moderator of Collision Hub as well.
Danyon, as a teenager in the late 90’s and early 2000’s he started hanging around some local body shops, and became intrigued with painting immediately. The fact that people could take a wrecked car, and make it look untouched, absolutely fascinated Danyon. He was literally that kid who wouldn’t leave the body shop, so they put him to work.
Danyon really wanted to be a lawyer or an accountant. He made the decision, however, to not take on college debt and spend the rest of his life paying for it. Since he had been working in the body shop during high school and absolutely loved all aspects, Danyon chose to pursue it as a career. His dad was still alive at the time and encouraged Danyon to do what he loved. He suggested Danyon go to Thaddeus Stevens College and get an affordable degree. It was the best move he ever made without question. Danyon’s dad owned a locally well-known sub shop up until his death, so family businesses mean more to him than most. In his heart, he always knew that he wanted to work for a family run business, as he firmly believes that they are the lifeblood of America. Before joining ZABS, Danyon was a ZABS customer. He was always impressed that whether he worked in a bigger shop or smaller shop, Danyon was treated with the same respect. He loves being part of a company with strong ethics and moral values.
The most accomplishment Danyon is most proud is right before joining Zimmerman’s in 2009, he spent a semester as a refinish instructor at Thaddeus Stevens. In his role now, Danyon get to see what some of his students have become. One of them opened his own shop, and several others have become high end technicians. It feels good to Danyon to know that he had a small part in that.
Danyon also works as a C20 Refinish Moderator at Collision Hub where he manages monthly meetings with collision centers from all over the US. He creates and presents information that is specifically designed for the paint shop, from full inventory control to in depth training on the art of color match. This virtual group allows painters from all over the country to learn, converge and be the best they can be in their field.
If you are interested in learning more about ClarityCoat, you can visit us here-
Website: https://claritycoat.com
Facebook: https://facebook.com/claritycoatofficial
Instagram: https://instagram.com/claritycoat_official
This is the Autobody podcast presented by Clarity Code. We'll get stories and talk to people from all over the industry, painters, body guys, manufacturers, and anybody in between. Let's do it. Welcome to the Autobody Podcast. Autobody podcast, presented by Clarity Code. Now here's your host, Adam Huber. Hey everyone.
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we have Dan on from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He is the business service manager at Zimmerman Auto Body Supplies and the C 20 Refinish moderator at Collision Hub. Um, Daniel's doing some pretty cool things. He, Daniel, I didn't ask you this, but how old are you? I'm 37. I will be 38 in April, so I'm like 37 and I don't know, whatever we call it, seven eighths or something.
I was gonna, I was actually thinking that you were younger than that. You look young for 37, man, you look good. That's cause I don't have, it's, I have dogs and no kids.
can confirm. Can't confirm. I think, I think, I think that's the, the secret. We were, uh, before we started the podcast, we were just talking about, um, Pennsylvania and how they're actually having a nice winter and have like zero snow. And then here last week we got in South Dakota, we got like 20 plus inches and it's been a miserable couple of weeks, so I'm happy for you.
Thank you. Not really. I appreciate that. But , I'm, I'm not happy for you . I finally got to use my snowblower and like really put it to the test. So I guess I, I guess that's great. . That's great. Um, okay, so Danen, uh, talk to me about like, um, what yo and Danen was like, how you got into this crazy industry. Um, cuz I think you have a pretty neat and an interesting story so, Uh, can I tell people how you got into it?
Yeah. It's a, it's like a really bizarre, um, it's, it's kind of strange, like, so when I was in high school, um, I did really well. I was on honor roll and, uh, I did like super good in school and my dad was a lot older when I was born. Like, he was born in, uh, 37. I was born in 85, so like, he was 48 when he had me.
So it's, it's pretty old to have to have a, a kid. And, um, you know, he had, you know, being born in 37, he was like tail end of, of, you know, really tough times for this country. So he had a different, you know, state of mind than, than, you know, kids I went to school with, with their parents because I didn't grow up with a, a, you know, a parent that went to college or anything like that.
And even though I worked hard in, in school, my dad was kind of like, look, you know, uh, it, it's super important to do well and you know, to be as smart as you can and learn as much as you possibly can. But like, there's no money for you, you know, to go to college or anything like that. And initially, like my strengths in high school were, were accounting, um, like super, super good at accounting.
And, uh, I had some, a lot of public, like speaking type classes. So I initially wanted to be an attorney and then followed up like with an accountant. Like that's what I wanted to do. And, and back then, like, I graduated high school in, um, oh three and, uh, I, I was, uh, playing golf and did, did really well on golf and, and had a, a partial sh partial scholarship there and wound up breaking my leg and lost that.
So there was no, there was no money for me unless I was gonna take on, you know, college debt and loans and stuff and, and being blessed with a dad, uh, who talked me out of that like, look, it's not really something that, that you want to do. So, you know, at 16 years old I was always super into cars. Like, I just, I always loved cars, um, when I was young.
it's all I cared about. Like when I was 16 it was, it was work and, uh, school and cars, it's like, it's all I cared about. I didn't party, I didn't do anything. Like I wasn't a wild man, I just cared about cars. So a friend of my dad's had a body shop and I just thought it was like super fascinating that you would take a wrecked car and then like fix it.
I couldn't understand how that works. So, you know, at like 14, 15 I was like kind of hanging around, you know, the shop and it, it intrigued me. And then I got to the point where like, I just became that kid that like, just would always hang around your shop. And back in those days it's like I swept floors, I watched him tape cars and so it, it, when I got my license I was able to physically drive like back and forth from the shop.
So I worked in a grocery store, I worked in this little independent shop where I just learned how to wet sand. I learned how to tape cars up and spray primer and I just really fell in love with it. So, you know, I got through high school and um, at the end, I'll never forget this, like the, my senior year, my guidance counselor said, what are you gonna do like when you're, when you're done?
And I was like, well, I'm gonna go to Steven's trade for a collision repair. And, and he said, why would you ever do that? You know, with his as good as you do in school, you want to go work on cars? And I'm like, well, my dad just told me to do what I want to do and I want to fix cars and I think it's cool and I, I want to paint cars.
So they all tried to talk me out of it and they couldn't do it. So, um, I went to Stevens Trade, which is a local school for me, and went there for, for two years. And the whole time I had worked at, uh, a dealership and an independent as, uh, as a, a painter prepper. . And then I got my estimating license. So like when summers were, were in, I would be full-time.
And then, uh, when I was Steven's two year school, I would work in the evenings and weekends. Like I just was, I was, if I wasn't at school, I was either working in a shop, I worked as a server for a little bit, like whatever I had to do to pay my tuition and whatever it took to keep learning the trade is what I did.
So I graduated, I was like, I think I just turned 20, I graduated from Stevens, worked at, uh, worked at a, a dealership as a painter and then wound up going into a restoration shop for a while and then back to an independent. But the whole, my whole time I always worked, I always worked in two shops. I never just worked in one.
So like I'd work at one from like eight to five. I'd work at another one in the evenings, and then I worked at like, you know, weekends, whatever it took. So I was always working in a shop in different, different aspects of a shop. So, When I was 21, unfortunately, you know, my, my dad passed away and I started to kind of figure out like, okay, so what do I want to, what do I want to do here long term?
And I kind of stayed full-time at the dealership. And, and then it, it just, it, the, the pace of it at the time was, it, it was too hard for me to deal with that. And like, dealing with my dad's passing, it was too hard. So I went to this independent shop and something super cool, we, we did a lot of heavy trucks and we did, you know, collision repair and I was doing estimating, I was doing painting.
And we actually painted the, uh, truck that carried the very first piece of the World Trade Center memorial. Took us like nine months to restore this truck. And like, if you, there's a picture of it on my Instagram, but like, there's an eagle going down the side with an American flag. And then there's like on the one fuel tank, it's got the firemen putting the, the, uh, flag in the grounds.
And then the other side is the Statue of Liberty, like this really elaborate paint job. So, um, You know, we were doing all that stuff and, and, um, it was a great shop. I loved it. And 2009, my, my old teacher from Stevens, him and I were super close. He called and said, look, I gotta do a sabbatical. Would you wanna come in here and, and teach?
And I'm like, look, I can teach for finish, but like, I'm not, I can't fix, I don't, I don't fix cars. Like I don't do structural repairs. I can put bumpers on, I can fix, you know, scratches, ding, stuff like that. But if you put me on a frame rack, I would've totaled the car. That's still true to this day. I don't, I don't touch structural vehicles.
So they brought me in. I taught for, um, an entire semester. And so I would teach from seven to 11 and then go back to the shop, and then worked from 12 to eight. So I did it for like a good, I don't know, five months or however long it was. And at that time, I had met, um, uh, a paint rep that worked for B A S F because I had used BSF products.
And, and they worked really well for me. And he said, look, you know, Pennsylvania's getting ready to go waterborne. That's something that you would be interested to do is come, come work for us as a tech rep. So I thought about it and I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. So, um, so you know what, this, this is probably a, a cool opportunity.
So 2009, I, uh, I took a job as a A B A S F tech rep. And really the, the, from 2009 until about 2017 in Pennsylvania, I did like all the demos, the installations, the trainings for the B A S F waterborne line. And like, it was just like, really, it's like, it's so strange when you look back, I look back at my career, like I didn't ex, I never picked some of these things to have happened that, that I wound up getting involved with.
So like, probably like 2016, 2017, I got involved with the B A S F marketing department and um, I started like developing colors for some of their builders. So I started working with like kc, the guy that used to be on Gas Monkey Garage, Jonathan Gouldsby. They had this all girls, uh, build through, um, through Bogie who, who is All Girls Garage.
I did a, a color for, um, Rutledge Wood for an eBay Motors build. I started doing like all this like really interesting stuff. And then Kristen and I met from Collision Hub because, um, I went out to Arkansas to film some B A S F virtual certification videos. And so got a relationship with her and then through my jobber that I work for, I said, look, you know, did you ever get on the road and do like some of these classes, you know, that you're doing now, but in person?
And they had done 'em like at sema, but never, never, uh, on the road. So we brought 'em out and we did it. And then like Covid hit and she said, would you be interested in, in, I'm gonna start these 20 groups. Would you want to run my, uh, my paint side of things? So I did that and uh, you know, I've been doing that for the last couple years.
So, um, it's kind of cool because I have no shops all over the country and. . I work with Larry Monez frequently up in New York. And, and Jason, who is, is Kristen's kind of like head guy over there. Just the relationships have been huge and just meeting all these different shop owners and painters, you know, that just want to be the best of the best has been super cool.
So like, I mean, that's in a, in a nutshell, there's a, we could talk about this for hours, but yeah, I mean that's kind of the, the, the way it's gone for me, um, Yeah, it's just, it's just a bunch of opportunities. Like I just worked this past sema, I did a presentation with S C R S and the D EEG and, um, and B A S F.
We did a, a modern, uh, paint class at, at cmo, which went exceptionally well. So it's cool, you know, it's, it's nice to have this huge network of people, whether it be, you know, D E G S C R S with Aaron, b a s F, axon, o Bell, who I work with, Sherwin, um, the different manufacturers, you know, 3m, Norton, Sanin, Cobain, like, it's just, it's cool how big my network has gotten over the years just from meeting all these people.
That's awesome, man. Yeah, that's, I mean, if you wanna talk for hours, we certainly can. That makes my job very easy. , um, I, I'm, I'm curious. Okay, so, um, lots of different questions here. What was it like doing, going from the field and teaching. , uh, sorry, what was it like going, being in the field for a couple of years and, and, and doing what you do and then going into schools and like teaching kids?
Like what was that experience for you like? So, I, I think what was like really interesting is like, I, I have to retract way back. I mean, when I was, so my dad was super old school. He owned a business and when I was old enough to walk, he made my brother and I like come in and start like doing stuff in the business.
So I started working really young and then when I was 10 I got a paper route. and, you know, we conversed with like our neighbors and stuff like that. And, and, um, then I wound up, uh, getting a, a ca I started caddying when I was a teenager, so I would like caddy and do this paper route. Like I've had two jobs for as long as I could, could potentially remember.
And, you know, through those experiences as a young person and being around predominantly adults my entire life, it gave me a different perspective because I always loved learning. So when I was caddying and I would learn stuff from the doctors and lawyers and accountants and business owners, I learned a lot of stuff from them and I appreciated them putting time into teaching me.
My dad taught me a lot of stuff and so I always loved learning. And when I, when I got into this field, like for me, I'm level 1000 or I'm not interested in doing it. I, when I was 16, 15 years old, started getting dabbling in this business. Like I was all in. I mean, I was reading as much as I could buying collision repair books.
Like I was obsessed with it because I wanted to be the greatest version of a tech that I could possibly be. And since I've, I think what's interesting is if you really, really love to learn, at least in my case, it made me love to teach. So when they, I had a great teacher at Stevens, um, Frank Pet Patrol.
Unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago, but he was an awesome teacher and I loved the way that he went about instructing his students. So I always spent a lot of time with him. And when he called me and asked me, you know, Hey, would you want to come in and do this? And you gotta, you know, do these interviews and background checks and all this stuff, it wasn't even like a hesitation.
I was like, yeah, I can, I can do that. And um, I think the thing that is hard about it, , and this is a, you know, for a teaching perspective going into a school, I never once thought I would be a, you know, teach in a school. The thing I didn't like about it was the politics. And I learned that real fast. Like there's these upper level politics that trickle down and I was kind of like, look, I'm not built for this.
I mean, I'm here to teach these, you know, young adult males to learn a craft and a trade to help them, you know, make a successful living for their families. It's not about the, the politics. And so I think what had happened was I, I was bitten by that bug so hard of taking a kid that, you know, had some decent hand skills, but taking 'em to the next level and like doing exceptional paint jobs at a young age.
And when they had asked me to come on and be this, you know, trainer tech rep. . It just felt like a natural migration because I had this, you know, this last, you know, not a year, but I think it was, it was like, it was, it was probably five months that I spent teaching in the, in the school atmosphere. And I liked it so much that migrating into a tech role was easy.
The thing that was, that I wasn't prepared for was like, I was 25 and when I was 25, I probably looked like I was like 17 some, going into these shops with guys that were double my age, and the first thing they say is, have you ever painted a car? And I'm like, I mean, yeah. Like I, of course I've painted cars, like, why would you think I had, then I throw the gun at you and they're like, prove it
And I'm like, okay. So like I remember the first, like my first go around at, at training, we had a local shop in Lancaster. It was a dealership. It's called Lancaster Lincoln Mercury. It was the first waterborne conversion that we did, and I went in there, it was the three man paint team. All these guys were way older than me, and, and I said, look, I'm gonna, it's gonna be a hundred percent transparent with you guys.
I know this computer system, I know these undercoats, I know these clears. I know the color match process for the way that this, this company runs. I don't know this base coat because I don't know waterborne. So I talked to the, the manager and said, this is what I would like to do. Let me help them with computer system undercoats clears, picking the right variance, uh, all that stuff, but let me paint cars alongside of 'em and just let 'em split all the hours that I produce because I have to learn this base coat essentially just like they do.
Because waterborne then for us was so new. Nobody had real hardcore field experience. So I spent two weeks in this shop. and I just painted car after car, after car, after car. And by like the fifth car I painted, I'm like, this is not that. I'm much different than solvent. And um, so I I, I got it really quick and then it got me, you know, it kind of got me on the right path with those guys.
And then I adopted that model of if I have to go in and do a training, I'm just gonna paint cars with these guys. I'm not gonna be the guy standing outside in, you know, in a button down the shirt. Like, I'm just gonna paint cars with you. And I think that there's a ton of value in that. And, and for guys that are tech wrapping now, it's like you, you gotta get in there with them, help 'em tape cars up, help 'em prep, have conversations with them.
So I think that that migration for me, that really helped a lot to, to teach kids and then flip it. Cuz there's guys now that are 40 years old and I'm 25 and I gotta teach them. It's just, and I said, guys, look, I, I'm not here to teach you how to paint cars. You know how to do that. I'm not, I'm not your vo-tech instructor.
I'm here to teach you a paint system. And I always stuck by that. Like, I, you, you chose this as your profession. You know what you're doing and I am just here to show you how to use this, this paint line. And I think that worked really well. So to this day, I enjoy it. Like I enjoy getting on the C 20 group and doing my monthly classes and teaching those guys.
It's just, it's something I love doing. I love working with people and, and I still learn, I mean, I learned from other painters and other distributors and, and other paint manufacturers. Like, I like to be able to get that knowledge and, and pass that on to, to the next generation. Did you, so after that first initial shop, which I imagine that you probably garnered a lot of respect from those guys because you were just upfront and transparent with them and said, Hey, like, I'm kind of in the same situation as you guys.
I might know a little bit more of the technical side, um, and technical info of this stuff than you guys do. However, like technical info only goes so far, , like, and then you, then you have to actually spray it, right? Right. Um, , but you getting in there and, and getting some booth time with them and spraying right beside 'em or whatever, and them seeing, and you guys kind of going through the same challenges together.
If there were challenges, um, I'm sure that was a hell of a lot more respectful from, um, you got a lot more respect from them on that than you going in there and saying, Hey, it's basically the same. Just, here's the stuff. You should be fine. Just hit me up. If you have problems, I'm out. And then just leave.
Right. Um, oh, for sure. The next couple of shops that you did though, did you run into a lot of guys that were just really resistant to the process of going from solvent to water and you know, just called you out a bunch or anything like that? What was, what was that experience like for you? So we, you know, in the early days of water, um, we did a lot of, a lot of.
Backdoor research to make sure that we set, set these guys up for success. So like, we would go in, we would test their air, have conversations with the painters, look at their mixing rooms. It's all about, it was about, you know, getting off on the right foot with these guys cuz this is a major cultures change.
It didn't matter if they were staying within, you know, that particular brand's paint and just switching to water or switching brands to us and going to our water, which is a, a whole different process. Um, but basically, you know, it was all about, I I, I hate buzzwords or just like, I don't like cliche buzzwords.
But it, back then, you know, it was all about transparency because, you know, I always took it very seriously. Like this guy in this shop, whether he is a flat rate painter, an owner, uh, whatever it is. Like this guy needs this paint to put food on his family's table. And I take that very seriously. And for me, you know, I always wanted to find out what the concerns were up front.
So like, you know, what, what are you most nervous about? What are you most excited about? And that's, that was the important steps to take. And I still think that's important steps to take when, when you're dealing with someone who doesn't know you, they don't know who I am. They've never seen me before.
They don't know if I can paint. They don't know if I just went to college and applied for this job and now I have it because I was, you know, whatever the, my backstory is. So when, when it came, when it came down to, to the shops there afterwards, what I would like to do is, is I would go in and like, it didn't matter if they were just changing from solvent to water in the line or going from brand to brand.
It's like, let's do a couple demos. Let's paint cars together. It gives me time to get to know you. You get to know me. You can see before this paint even hits your shop that I'm capable of, of troubleshooting for you, fixing colors for you, uh, all that stuff. So you really gotta build. The whole thing is about building trust before you even go in.
And then once we would do the install, it's like, refresh the mixing room. This is their home away from home. These guys are spending 50 hours a week here. So, you know, what do they need to make their work life a better place to be? So it's, it's more than just the stuff inside the can. Anybody can sell you good paint.
I mean, it's, everybody makes good paint. People that say that the, that someone else's pain is junk is not, it's just not true. Where's the, um, where's the things outside of that that that's what matters to to me. So I would always try to go. and find out what they need and what their expectations were and just set 'em up for, for success because I understand their concerns.
Cuz I'm still a painter at heart. I mean, I, I still paint now. I mean, a guy that I used to work with. We paint boats. I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll be a painter forever. Hmm. Very interesting. Um, so let's talk a little bit about this. Um, so you're, you're a rep for, um, you still are a rep going around selling paint, um, working with shops and everything like that.
And then, um, uh, who was the, sorry if I'm forgetting, but who was the gal that you met from Collision Hub? It was Oh, Christy Felder. Yep. Kristen Felder. Um, how did that, um, relationship kind of come around? . So there, there's a lady that works for B A S F, she's, she's the, she runs their marketing for the, the refiner side.
Her name is Tina Nellis. And I met Tina Nellis. It was like really bizarre. Um, it was probably like 2015 or so. She, she was into powerboats and I was, and I was like painting power boats and I'd done a whole bunch of like crazy powerboat projects and I had always used B A S F on all these paint jobs. So she called me and said, Hey, my husband and I are buying this cigarette boat and I'm kind of looking for some input on, on products and, and what to use.
So because she was marketing and, you know, her technical team at the time was, you know, they're very much for refin and like I, I love going outside of the realm of normalcy. So I'm like, well this is how I do all the boats with B A S F and this is how they've always worked. And so her and I got this like super cool relationship.
And then she would start calling me randomly for like, just technical stuff that, that was outside of the realm of automotive or finished aka a like collision repair. So like a lot of the stuff that these builders would do, there's no technical data on it because it's essentially breaking all the rules of standard collision repair.
So I would tell her like, yeah, you can use this Clear to do that. And uh, this primer surfacer works really well. So when her and I got this relationship going, um, we were at Northeast Trade Show in like 2015 or 16, and that's when Casey Matthew had left Gas Monkey Garage and she said, Hey, he's gonna be here.
Uh, he's thinking about going to B A S F. Can you come have dinner with us? So my wife and I, we were up. . We had dinner with him and him and I hit it off really well. And so he said, look, I wanna make this switch, but I want you to come out and be the one to train me. So I'm like, well, look, I don't know if I can do that.
I gotta run it by Tina. So we figured it all out. I flew out to, um, to Dallas and we did, uh, a bunch of paint jobs with, with Onyx at the time with Casey. And so then he would fly me out there a couple times a year and he, his YouTube channel at the time was like on fire because he was putting a lot of effort into it.
So I would fly out and him and his guy Eric, like, we would film all kinds of stuff. There's a guy named Ron Cone that used to work. He was in a show called Mob Steel or Detroit Speed with Mob Steel. And so him and I would go out and then like we would, you know, do all kinds of, of stuff for the YouTube channel.
We did a bunch of instructional videos and Kristen and I had met because, um, once again, like she was doing a lot of the, the marketing and, and teaming up with B A S F. So her and I got to know each other really well and, um, . So her and I just made this, made this great relationship out of the gate because, you know, she grew up as in a body shop and painting and like, I essentially grew up body shop and painting and um, you know, she would call me for one-off questions and I would call her for like one-off questions and then we would see each other at trade shows.
And, um, yeah, I mean it just, the, the relationship just kind of slowly grew over time. And then once I flew out, like they needed somebody to go out to film these training videos and build the storyboard for, um, the B A S F recertification videos. And Tina was like, look, I really want you to do this. Can you do it?
Um, so I flew out and I did it, and it was kind of cool because even though I was a, a technical person for B A S F through this job, or I wasn't B A S F employed, so I had a little bit of more wiggle. , um, because I wasn't like strangled held by a manufacturer and I would say, look, this is the recommendation that I'll make to you because I know that this works, but you're not gonna see this in writing when you work for a manufacturer.
You can't do that stuff. So like, you know, 3M or Norton or somebody may know one of those tech guys may know factually that this process works, but unless it's been run through the ringer by the chemist and the laboratory, like they can't go out and tell you to do that. So I'll say like, Hey, requisite, this process has works for me for the last 10 years and I know this works.
But just understand that this is not a warrantied system where B A S F doesn't recognize the ability to do this. Like, I'll give you an example. A lot of your builders, they'll put on five or six coats of clear back to back and they'll start like when you see a super straight car that just looks like a mirror, a lot of people think they keep sanding them and you're clearing 'em.
That's not what happens. They put a ton of clear on, they start block blocking that clear down with like 400 grit. And they guide code between steps. Well, if you try to put three coats of clear on, you're, after the second step of standing, you're, you're through it. So we kind of figured out, okay, what BSA products can I take to that limit to allow them to do this where I can put seven coats on potentially and use this clear like a body filler where I'm gonna level it and then polish it up.
So that's where I got involved, where, you know, I knew how far to take it. And then Kristen and I, um, you know, just, well, we like to break the rules a little bit, but then also stay in line. Interesting. So how did the, how did the 20 group part of it come around then? So, I, I can't remember if, I think it might have, I think she was working on it right before, right before Covid hit, and then when Covid hit, it was like, all right, thi like, this thing needs to happen because there are people that are stuck at home for X amount of weeks or months or whatever.
Um, I think it was, I think it was pre covid. I, I don't want to say the wrong information and say something wrong, but I think it caught, maybe, caught more fire then because like we, we had to do this. But she had called me one day and said, would you be interested in, she's like, I'm gonna start this, this the C 20 group.
We're gonna have an owner's group, we're gonna have an estimators group, we're gonna have a technician's group, we're gonna have a painter's group. Would you be interested in running the painter's group? So we talked a little bit about it and, and I'm like thinking, man, how am I gonna do this? Like, you know, with my job, cause this is, you know, develop the information, make the PowerPoint.
Like this is a, this is a big venture to, to take on and it's do this job. Yeah. I want to, I wanna do it really well. So, um, you know, I thought, I, I really don't want to have to do this, you know, uh, evenings and weekends cause I'm already doing my own stuff with, you know, kind of like that and, and how, how could I potentially do this?
So, Um, I worked out a, a deal with her to where, um, I basically do it on, on the company time that, that I work for now. And then I use those modules that I build for Collision Hub to do training for my local customers and our sales team and our tech team. So that's kind of how it happened. And it's interesting, like if you would look back in on the World fair, there's a, um, collision Hub, did a World Fair for a couple years and I'm, they're probably gonna keep doing them, but the first one we flew out, me and, uh, a couple of the guys from Sada flew out there.
And, um, we did, we did one, we used a couple of my, uh, presentations and did, we did this presentation that I built. It was a four, four part presentation on essentially color. And it was all about light sources and Kelvin and c r i ratings. And it was about, um, the chemistry and adjusting color. I mean, it was intense to where like, it, it, it got a lot of publicity because no one had ever looked at.
Color and color theory to this magnitude. And, um, it, it really, I think it really took that group and caught that group on fire because people were like, wait a minute, this isn't stuff I'm gonna read in Fender Bread. I'm not gonna read this in body shop business. Like this stuff is, this information is way out there.
I was very blessed to have, you know, with my relationships with some of the pink companies that I'd run into weird situations where it's like, why does this happen in a shop? Like, okay, we know the generic term of, okay, the, the solvent was trapped or whatever, but like, what is the chemical reason this stuff happened?
So I started integrating in these classes, a lot of chemistry based training. . Um, in high school, I was obsessed with, with chemistry, like it was chemistry and, and accounting were, were huge for me. And so when I started accessing these chemists and they're telling me this stuff and then I would start researching it, it like blew my mind.
So when you would look at the C 20 group, the refinished class, the re refin class that we do now, um, a lot of it is, it really is chemistry based because these guys, these guys want to be the absolute best of the best. And they don't want to just have elementary education. They want to know, like, they almost want it to be too much.
Like this is, this is, this is too far, this is too deep. That's what they want. Um, and, and that's what we do. So I think that's the interesting thing about this, the, the re refinish group is that there is so much, um, information there that takes, like I know that the, the four part series I did on color, I have a hundred hours of research in making that class.
Um, Yeah, it, it's really intense. So that's not just like me Googling things, that's me calling chemists and people from 3M and calling, I called light manufacturers. Cause that had to understand the difference between, okay, well what about, I hear about Lumens and Kelvin, but like, okay, now we have cr, I, now we have spectral curves, now we have wavelengths and nanometers.
Like, I needed to understand all this stuff at a super high level so that I could build a presentation that made these painters understand, you know what, there was way more to me looking at a color, but if I understand the technicality of looking at color and I simplify it in my paint shop, and now I don't have color problems anymore, or my color problems are super far between, like, I don't even really think about it because I built processes around it.
That's what we tried to do. And um, we just took it, we just took it to a. A level that was so far out there that it's, I don't, to this day, I don't know anybody else that's doing the stuff that we're doing in that group. Hey guys. Adam from the podcast. I hope you are enjoying today's episode. Just wanted to ask you a quick favor.
If the show has brought you value in some way, would you mind giving us a review and sharing the show? It really helps the show get out there. Also, if you are looking to expand the services that your shop offers and you want to do more than collision work, you should really check out our company Clarity Coat.
Clarity Coat is a peelable paint that allows body shops to offer color changes cheaper than a repaint, while still looking like real paint. You can also offer clear protection that has no edges and is sprayed instead of laid. Unlike vinyl and P ppf, clarity code can be sanded and polished so you can give your customer the exact look that they are wanting.
If you are looking to expand your shop services, go to clarity code.com and fill out our Become an installer form. Alright, let's get back to the show. So you are the type of guy that you want to. way, dive in deep, like to the deepest deeps that is out there, and then cherry pick the information, simplify it down to, um, deliver the best possible education and everything like that to the guy who, because I would, would you think it's fair to say that 90 to 95% of the guys that you run across every single day outside of this 20 group just want the shit to work and they don't really care to know most of the chemistry or anything like that, but when they run into a problem, you're now able to go back to this knowledge bank and say, okay, I know exactly why you're having this, this, and this problem.
And then again, you can distill it down into some basic information of, well, this is why you're running into this problem. If you adjusted these two, three things, then you're not gonna have this problem anymore and here's kind of the reason why. And then that's a hundred percent is accurate. Um, exactly.
Fair to say. We, uh, you're exactly right. Um, and like I'll tell you how, I'll tell you how far I take this. So I did a class, um, we did a class on UV technology and the thing that I started researching was the individual paint companies and how they provide curing documentation for UV tech in different facets.
Some of 'em didn't give the power of the light, some of 'em give a distance, some of 'em give a time. And I started to narrow this thing down to actual scientific measurements and terminology to make sure that whatever paint lines UV product you are using, I can take the light source that you're potentially thinking about using to cure.
reverse engineer the data for it and then tell you what distance and for how much time it takes to cure that individual product. And the reason I say it takes, like, this is how far I go, is, uh, my brother and sister-in-law are both engineers for Tesla. So when I get something that's like really out there, like, okay, these are like e equals mc square type equations, like beyond my comprehension, I'll call 'em and I'm like, look, okay, what does this actually mean?
So this, um, this UV class I did, I called my sister-in-law because I started learning about this millijoules term, which is essentially it's a transfer of energy over a, uh, over, uh, a footprint for a dictation of time. And I'm like, how do, okay? I'm like, listen, Brie, I don't understand how to word this, like word this to me like I'm in fifth grade because I can't wrap my head around it.
So once she explained it to me, I was able to say, okay, this is how it works. Here's the, the, the equations it takes. This is how you do this. So then I built Excel programs to give to our guys in C 20 that says, okay, if you have this specific, whatever your light brand is for UV cure, you put in these data points and then it's gonna sum up what your distance is and how long the cure time is gonna be.
So to your point, a guy that doesn't know any of this stuff goes in, puts UV primer down, does a cure the way it says in the tech data sheets. And after the car is assembled, the UV primer starts peeling and he just wants to know why it's peeling. Well, I'm taking it to the point where we're not either gonna get there because let's do all the r and d ahead of time so that I know that if I'm gonna use this UV primer with this particular tool, this is how I'm gonna cure it.
Um, . So that's how far we take this stuff. It is to paint companies, to their credit, they wanna simplify it. And I get that. I mean, if you read a recipe to make a cake, that's gonna tell you, okay, these are the eight steps to do it. We're not gonna put in 27 steps, uh, of measuring your oven temperature and checking how long it stays there.
For this period of time we're doing that, we're taking it to the next level because in my opinion, some of this stuff that exists and, and the paint world and the chemistry world is just extremely advanced. So I want to go right between super high advanced and right between elementary and figure out how we make that the standard, because the more a shop knows, the better they are.
Like one of my favorite things when you start talking about waterborne, um, with waterborne, we. solvent used to leave solvent. The solvents would, you know, leave, they would leave the film. We're dehydrating that base coat, waterborne base coat needs to dehydrate. We need to whip the water away from it. So we did an entire class on the, on dehydration of waterborne base coat and what that looks like and what that means.
So it's really just taking things, um, and, and determining how far we, we over, we don't want to overcomplicate it because then nobody understands it. Um, we take the overcomplicated data and then simplify that, but go a couple steps above a regular tech data sheet. Uh, I imagine that there are a lot of people listening right now that are just rolling their eyes and they're just like, yeah, Jesus dude.
Like, just put the pain on the car and just, and just bake the shit. And they just call it a day. But, , I would, I would venture to guess this. Um, I don't look at stuff like this as necessarily useless information. I, for me personally, I, you get to, you get to a point where like, agree, there's kind of like a point of an overturned just with all knowledge and things, right?
Um, it's a bell curve, but what I find interesting is most of the time when you come across people that have a very, oh, I, I don't need to know about this. Like, just whatever, just put the stuff on the card, just be done with it. Um, they're also the ones that as soon as something doesn't work, it's the product's fault or the, you can tell they get frustrated because they just, they, they don't have any idea why they're running into these issues.
And I think what's interesting is the people that do just. even. Even if you were to go just a little bit below surface level and figure out stuff, there is a whole bunch of combination of things and scenarios that you're gonna, that you can have someone throw at you and you'd be like, oh yeah, I know that's why that's happening.
And then you've now become just God, like you're just like the guy to go to. And then it's just interesting because a lot of people would fix a lot of their issues if they would just dive a little bit more than surface level and dive into like how something works, why it works that way and everything.
So with the, as an example, with this UV curing and everything, I would imagine, so obviously on the one end you have, okay, well you didn't let it cure long enough or improperly cured, so now it's peeling up. But then on the other end, the general fix to that, for most people that I've run across is, okay, well then just.
Throw it at it longer. Just, uh, it says to, it says to do it for an hour, we're gonna do it for four because more is better. Right? And then what happens is four works. And they're like, cool. I was right. I didn't like, that was the fix. Bingo. But now you're talking about bingo inefficiencies, right? You're talking about three, three hours that you, it could have been, it could have been something as simple as, well actually you needed an hour and a half instead of just an hour.
Because at that, there's a critical point where it, it gets to the point where it's, it's now done and cured, and now you can just leave it. And all you needed was 30 minutes more. But now you're, you're two and a half hours inefficient. And that in a, in an industry, in a service-based industry, like what we're talking about, it's just, that's just an unacceptable level of inefficiency.
Um, so I always find it interesting that. With any product out there and any process you're going to have, especially in the United States, um, which, you know, we do have some international people, but what people internationally need to understand is that the amount of variance there is in climate, just in the United States would blow people's minds, uh, internationally anyways.
You have incredibly humid weather down south. You have incredibly dry weather, I don't know, Arizona. Arizona, like, uh, in the Southwest, um, incredibly dry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But as for someone who dives just a little bit deeper than surface level, you can make these small adjustments and say, oh, you've got 25, 40% more humidity over here.
Here's what you're gonna have to count for and adjust for. Um, uh, what's your, what's your thoughts on, so I can give you an example of exactly what you just said. . Um, and this relates to every single person that paints a car in the United States of America. So one of the things that's, that's happening is the paint company's cost to make chips, right?
Chips that are supposed to match a formula or ovarian is astronomical. The cost of chip production that are non printed, that are sprayed is absolutely unbearable. So the paint companies over the last several years have invested a ton of resource and a ton of time in spectometer, or you can call it a color camera, and that technology.
So that being said, the camera technology is so advanced right now that. The vast majority of paint manufacturers, their end game is to get rid of color chips and to do 100% digital match. They can give you a better, faster match and give you a toll that they can update. That is not an antiquated chip that costs a huge amount of money.
You look at Teslas, you can update that vehicle through your wifi, and it's more advanced than buying the next year model because I can do it like that. If I have to wait for variance chips four times a year. By the time I got the variance chip, it's already been out for three months. So this is where I'm going with this.
If I look at the United States on a map and I look at Pittsburgh, if I look at Detroit, Michigan, if I look at Seattle, Washington, Miami, Florida, the climates. and industries and those areas are so different that here is a huge thing that we teach in in C 20 or finish in Collision Hub, that the pink companies were like, Ugh, we actually didn't think about this.
So we have a little known phenomenon where I live and in Detroit and a couple other areas called industrial fallout rail dust. You cannot pick rail dust up with a naked eye, can't see it. The cameras, the way at which they're magnifying a pearl, a Micah, a flake, a pigment is a hundred times more powerful than what you can see with your eyeball.
So with that being said, if I have a car from 2018 where I live, and I'm gonna bring it in, And I'm gonna do the prep on the hood to do a camera shot. Paint company says tri act, it, uh, polish it, um, glaze it, do your camera shot. That's fine if you're in Miami, Florida. But what if you're in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia or, or Detroit, where I now have a piece of metal particulate, most likely, lots of them, aka rail dust embedded in that paint.
And I take a camera shot of it. The camera is going to pick it up. So what do I need to do? If I'm in an area like that, I have to claybar that car first. The spot that I'm gonna camera shot. My first stat needs to be claybar to take the contam. I gotta decontaminate that paint to take it back to o e M.
Then I sand it, then I compound it, then I glaze it. Now I have a pure formm O eem finish. Just take a camera shot of. It is proven over and over and over again that if you do that in an area like where I live, I'm not sure hu is where you live, um, where that is going to be a difference between a blendable match from a camera shot versus I'm gonna do a camera shot and then spend two hours tinning it because the industrial fallout, that's just one micro example of, of what can happen when we're not aware of our environment.
If I take Miami, Florida, I got the same car from 2018, is that I do in, in Pennsylvania. The difference I have there is that I don't have industrial fallout, but I'm gonna have way more UV deterioration. So because of the environment that I'm in, I really need to look at these individual panels and look at my prep process differently than a guy in Pennsylvania or a guy in New York City.
So the environment is huge. Um, you know, and yeah. You talked about U Ofv. Absolutely. There's a, there's a shop out in Dallas, Texas. Because they have sun a lot all day long where they can cure their UV primers outside in about 25 minutes and you can probably bet all your money on it. The majority of days you're gonna be able to do that.
Pennsylvania, we're gonna have a snow day or where you are in Dakota snow day, overcast for a month. I can't, there's no way I can come up with a process for that. So the whole thing about this is about, is about building a process that's repeatable regardless of your weather conditions where you live regardless of your environment.
Because we're all different. So if you're in Pennsylvania or Florida or Texas or Washington or Dakota or or Michigan, do your process the same with every single car. And that way I don't worry about these little nuances cuz I'm gonna take that vehicle back to OEM or I'm gonna cure my product the same way every single time.
Well, and not only that, but you know, we've all seen the picture of like the silver chip on a silver car and they have like six of 'em right there. And they's like. Yeah, I don't know. Like, I don't know which one this is supposed to be, you know, that type of thing. And so just from that one singular aspect, like you're, you're going to either fix or greatly reduce the chances of error on that.
But I'm just sitting here thinking to myself like the amount of data that, um, paint companies or, well, I'll just go off of paint. Companies are gonna be able to pull from something like a camera is insane because what they're gonna be able to do then is they're gonna be able to, so let's just say, you know, within, let's say within the first three months of something like this coming out and going mass, mass market, right?
Within a couple of months, they're gonna be able to say, okay, we had a hundred cars all over the US that were the same make model, build time, everything like that. So you can make a relative statement that they were sup, they were basically the exact same. Panel all the way across the board. But when the shop up in Detroit painted, um, painted it, it aired, there was, there was this, there was these errors that happened and then when down in Miami there was these things that happened and blah, blah, blah.
And then you can start to build out a system where when you put that camera on that panel, um, one, it either gives you a procedure of, okay, you live in the, you live in the north, um, north central, Northeast, central North. I don't know what you guys would call it up there, , sorry, , the Northeast, uh, you guys live up here.
Here's your steps that you have to do in order to prep this panel for this. Whereas down in Miami, um, okay, so you can make a fair statement that they have a lot of salt water, right? So maybe they want to do an acid bath Exactly. Previous to that to get rid of all the, um, all the salts, right? Um, so there's, there's your differences in prep, depending on your shop, where you're located in, blah, blah, blah.
But then also take a shot of that and now it's gonna spit out two different results for the Northeast versus this, um, south, uh, southeast Florida. You need a little bit more of this because you have a little bit more UV exposure. And if you don't do it, then maybe your whites are gonna come out maybe just a tad more yellow than they're supposed to be because of whatever reason.
And then in the north, um, east, you guys are gonna have to do this, this, and this a little bit differently. You can start to just like adjust these tiny little things over time to get a way better result and way better efficiencies, which I dunno for people they're thinking like, man, you guys are like really overthinking this
Well, I mean, you, you could make that argument, but I would rather, again, going back to like, maybe it's the German in me, but I would just really would rather have something extremely efficient, um, and not have to second guess myself and know that it's done right versus. sitting there scratching my head like, I really don't know why this happened like this.
And this is really annoying to me. And then I, it's funny cause I'm, I'm super German too, and like I, I, um, I work with the guys from SAD a lot. I mean, I, I, I, um, I've done a couple videos with those guys just on air movers and, um, you know, spray gun technology and they got a, an incredibly, incredibly smart group of guys that work for them.
Um, you know, I, I don't know if you could have a better team, uh, for s spray gun equipment than you do for what we have available through Dan Am, um, with, with that soda team and, um, I think that those guys are in that same, you know, school of thought where. When you learn about the way that those guns are manufactured in Germany and you say, I don't understand, like how is this gun $1,200?
I would've questioned that myself 15 years ago. But now that I know the way those guns are machined and the fine tuning in them, and when you're talking about 0.001% differentiation because the complexity of paint finished and you got a 46 V Mazda, you're gonna wish that you had your thousand dollars gun that was built to do this as opposed to your Harbor freight $200 gun.
And don't understand why the car's blotchy or why it's too dark because of the over-engineering that they're doing at, at the s spray gun level. Um, and and I think that when you're over-engineering it, cause we don't have to know all the specifics of, of the soda measurements and, and all those things, but I want to be confident.
That the company I'm buying from over-engineered it so that when I go to do my job, it's simplified cuz they did all the hard work. And what we're trying to do is say, okay, the paint companies are, do a great job. Every paint company out there does a good job with, with their information. I just want to say, you know what, why don't we just take it one more step?
Um, and that, like I said, the clay bar thing is a great example. Hey, I'm a rep for x, y, Z paint company. I predominantly do New York and Pennsylvania and I'm gonna make sure that my guys know, look, you know, we have rail dust, we have industrial fault, we have all this stuff. Make sure you clay bar that car before you do this.
Um, and then one of the things, I'm a huge fan of his imagery. So like I have a, um, I have this magnifying glass, um, or not magnifying glass, a um, a uh, a magnifying camera that I use to photograph panels at a super deep level. Like I think I'm taking 'em at like. It's a couple hundred x. So I'm able to take panels that you would say, oh yeah, like, that looks good.
I would camera shoot that. And I used a bunch of examples that show you that it's not even close to ready for a camera shot, but we have to understand that we cannot see that. So the average human being, and it's no fault of us, it's any paint rep, a tech rep, you or I would look at it and say, oh, absolutely, that thing's ready for a camera shot.
Until I take and diagnose that thing deeper and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, there's no way I can go to good reading on this because I compounded it and I have all these crazy, uh, lines in it. The camera's gonna pick the lines up and it's gonna think it's either, uh, pearl, it's gonna think it's a, a metallic, it's gonna think it's something wrong with the panel and gimme a poor match, because I didn't understand what the camera was seeing.
So we're trying to simplify we're we're over complicating it to simplify it. Yep. Yeah. And your example about the guns, to me, Yes. What you're doing there is you're eliminating variables. So, uh, a lot of times for me, when it comes down to efficiencies, it's about eliminating variables. Um, so you have a piece of equipment that, you know, it's a good piece of equipment for about 70 to 80% of the time, but then that 20% of the time it's something's off with it, which then makes you slower, which then makes you more frustrated, which then makes you less money.
So if you're, if you're eliminating, like, okay, let's take the, let's take the camera as an example. 90% of the time you might be able to get away with Yep. Not prepping the panel as good as you possibly could. Right. And 90% of the time, you're probably gonna be fine. Now what you're overconfident in is that because of that 90%, you're like, ah, yep, Danen, he doesn't know what he's talking about.
I'm like, fuck that guy. But then you get that 10% where. One out of a hundred jobs, you, you get a misreading, which means then you have to repaint the car, which means now you're eight, eight hours behind and you've just, it, it just comes down to risk versus reward, right? You, you're gonna get away with it a lot of the times, most likely, but then that one time that it doesn't, you don't get away with it, was it?
You just have to ask yourself, was it really worth that? Was it really worth you cutting, quote unquote cutting that corner if you want to, if you want to kind of label it that way. Um, yeah, man, very interesting stuff and, uh, probably have to have you back on the show at some point to talk, to go a little bit deeper into some of these topics because I feel like we could probably just take a topic and then just take a second part.
Yeah, we can do that. I mean, it's, um, you can go from there. You know, this, this stuff gets, this stuff gets super deep. Like, I'll, I'll give you an example. Um, , do you ever hear the term sova chromatic? Does it, do you ever, have you ever heard that term, sova chromatic? So basically what the term sova, chromatic means is that, um, if you take a pigment, it will change its color based on the liquid that you let it down with.
So when I say let down, I mean reduce it with, so if I take a, a pigment and I reduce it out with, uh, acetone alcohol, um, water, gasoline, whatever, a liquid, and, and, and reduce it out, it can have an impact on the way that the color, the final color appears. So there is this insane example of it that you'll, you'll never see this in collision repair, but there's, there is an element that exists called brooker's marrow signing.
And essentially what it is, is the most salvato chromatic, uh, Pigment that you could even see. So when you let it down with individual products, it will go from purple to yellow to orange, to green to red. I mean, it changes that much. So when, when I did this color class, wow, I said, look, this is not gonna happen in your, in your paint shop, but here's what you need to understand.
What will happen is you have a, and this is kind of the engineering behind the education. So a paint rep comes in and you're using X brand of OEM approved paint and it's awesome. And that painter owner decided that they were gonna use this cheaper reducer. Like, oh, the cheaper, it's 30 bucks. And this guy from so-and-so told me it's the exact same thing, and your reducer is a hundred dollars.
Okay, well this is what we have to understand, that a hundred dollars reducer that was built to function with that paint, the results are predictable. . So if I take this unknown solvent, that is supposed to be the exact same, if there's one difference in it and it reacts incorrectly to one of your pigments and you start having color issues, who is the blame?
So it's just a little micro example of a paint company comes in and says, don't do this. And you say, why? And they say, cuz you're not supposed to. Well, I would rather tell you a super deep example of why Google broker's mari sanding look it up and you'll be like, oh, well Sova chromatic things are real. I probably shouldn't do this.
Obviously warranties and things like that. But you can, you can be more impactful with somebody using a visual than you can just saying, well void your warranty. Forget the warranty. I don't wanna have to reshoot the side of a car. . Yeah. And I can tell you from experience that yeah, American painters were like the answer.
Trust me, bro, is probably the biggest thing. And trust me, bro, is like the, is like the they don't now. Right? Where'd you hear that at? Trust me, bro. No, let me just show you the facts. Like, let's just talk about the facts. They don't need to trust me. I'm just gonna show you . Yeah, yeah. Uh, Danny, it is been an absolute pleasure having you on.
I, I feel like I've just sat, sat in class and just absorbed a ton of information. Um, is there anywhere there, is there anywhere that, uh, people can follow along with you and you have some of this info put out there and, you know, I, um, people can just, so like my Facebook is, is, you know, pretty, uh, you know, it's like, it's personal, it's not, not super, uh, business related.
Um, my, our company's Everman autobody supplies our Facebook there is, is is solid. Put a lot of information up there. Um, my Instagram tends to be a little bit more automotive related. My LinkedIn is, is, you know, more networking, things like that. But yeah, I mean, if you want to get super deep dive and you're a painter and you want to learn some of the stuff we're talking about, the Collision Hub C 20 group, um, you know, that that's where we do all this stuff.
And, uh, you know, the membership, I think it's like, I think they charge 50 bucks a month. It's like it's a no-brainer. Um, if anybody ever needs help, um, I'm always a a, a social media message away. I never, never have an issue with, um, talking to somebody over messenger if they need something. Perfect man.
Well, uh, guys, go head up, um, Damian and check out his socials. Uh, check out that 20 group. See, dive into the rabbit hole and see what, uh, see what you can blow your mind with. But uh, yeah man, I really appreciate you coming on today, and spend you spend some time with us. Blowing our minds, melting mine. I'm gonna have to go and just like I don't sit at corner.
Thanks Adam. Appreciate it bud. Think about my life decisions , but uh, yeah man, I really appreciate you coming on. You've been listening to the Autobody podcast presented by Clarity Code. Our passion is to talk to and about anyone in the industry, from painters, body guys, manufacturers, and anyone in between.
We hope you've enjoyed the show. Make sure to like rate and review and we'll be back soon. But in the meantime, visit us@claritycoat.com and find us on Facebook and YouTube at Clarity Coat. See you next time on the Autobody Podcast. This is the Autobody podcast presented by Clarity Code. We'll get stories and talk to people from all over the industry, painters, body guys, manufacturers, and anybody in between. Let's do it. Welcome to the Autobody Podcast. Autobody podcast, presented by Clarity Code. Now here's your host, Adam Huber. Hey everyone.
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we have Dan on from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He is the business service manager at Zimmerman Auto Body Supplies and the C 20 Refinish moderator at Collision Hub. Um, Daniel's doing some pretty cool things. He, Daniel, I didn't ask you this, but how old are you? I'm 37. I will be 38 in April, so I'm like 37 and I don't know, whatever we call it, seven eighths or something.
I was gonna, I was actually thinking that you were younger than that. You look young for 37, man, you look good. That's cause I don't have, it's, I have dogs and no kids.
can confirm. Can't confirm. I think, I think, I think that's the, the secret. We were, uh, before we started the podcast, we were just talking about, um, Pennsylvania and how they're actually having a nice winter and have like zero snow. And then here last week we got in South Dakota, we got like 20 plus inches and it's been a miserable couple of weeks, so I'm happy for you.
Thank you. Not really. I appreciate that. But , I'm, I'm not happy for you . I finally got to use my snowblower and like really put it to the test. So I guess I, I guess that's great. . That's great. Um, okay, so Danen, uh, talk to me about like, um, what yo and Danen was like, how you got into this crazy industry. Um, cuz I think you have a pretty neat and an interesting story so, Uh, can I tell people how you got into it?
Yeah. It's a, it's like a really bizarre, um, it's, it's kind of strange, like, so when I was in high school, um, I did really well. I was on honor roll and, uh, I did like super good in school and my dad was a lot older when I was born. Like, he was born in, uh, 37. I was born in 85, so like, he was 48 when he had me.
So it's, it's pretty old to have to have a, a kid. And, um, you know, he had, you know, being born in 37, he was like tail end of, of, you know, really tough times for this country. So he had a different, you know, state of mind than, than, you know, kids I went to school with, with their parents because I didn't grow up with a, a, you know, a parent that went to college or anything like that.
And even though I worked hard in, in school, my dad was kind of like, look, you know, uh, it, it's super important to do well and you know, to be as smart as you can and learn as much as you possibly can. But like, there's no money for you, you know, to go to college or anything like that. And initially, like my strengths in high school were, were accounting, um, like super, super good at accounting.
And, uh, I had some, a lot of public, like speaking type classes. So I initially wanted to be an attorney and then followed up like with an accountant. Like that's what I wanted to do. And, and back then, like, I graduated high school in, um, oh three and, uh, I, I was, uh, playing golf and did, did really well on golf and, and had a, a partial sh partial scholarship there and wound up breaking my leg and lost that.
So there was no, there was no money for me unless I was gonna take on, you know, college debt and loans and stuff and, and being blessed with a dad, uh, who talked me out of that like, look, it's not really something that, that you want to do. So, you know, at 16 years old I was always super into cars. Like, I just, I always loved cars, um, when I was young.
it's all I cared about. Like when I was 16 it was, it was work and, uh, school and cars, it's like, it's all I cared about. I didn't party, I didn't do anything. Like I wasn't a wild man, I just cared about cars. So a friend of my dad's had a body shop and I just thought it was like super fascinating that you would take a wrecked car and then like fix it.
I couldn't understand how that works. So, you know, at like 14, 15 I was like kind of hanging around, you know, the shop and it, it intrigued me. And then I got to the point where like, I just became that kid that like, just would always hang around your shop. And back in those days it's like I swept floors, I watched him tape cars and so it, it, when I got my license I was able to physically drive like back and forth from the shop.
So I worked in a grocery store, I worked in this little independent shop where I just learned how to wet sand. I learned how to tape cars up and spray primer and I just really fell in love with it. So, you know, I got through high school and um, at the end, I'll never forget this, like the, my senior year, my guidance counselor said, what are you gonna do like when you're, when you're done?
And I was like, well, I'm gonna go to Steven's trade for a collision repair. And, and he said, why would you ever do that? You know, with his as good as you do in school, you want to go work on cars? And I'm like, well, my dad just told me to do what I want to do and I want to fix cars and I think it's cool and I, I want to paint cars.
So they all tried to talk me out of it and they couldn't do it. So, um, I went to Stevens Trade, which is a local school for me, and went there for, for two years. And the whole time I had worked at, uh, a dealership and an independent as, uh, as a, a painter prepper. . And then I got my estimating license. So like when summers were, were in, I would be full-time.
And then, uh, when I was Steven's two year school, I would work in the evenings and weekends. Like I just was, I was, if I wasn't at school, I was either working in a shop, I worked as a server for a little bit, like whatever I had to do to pay my tuition and whatever it took to keep learning the trade is what I did.
So I graduated, I was like, I think I just turned 20, I graduated from Stevens, worked at, uh, worked at a, a dealership as a painter and then wound up going into a restoration shop for a while and then back to an independent. But the whole, my whole time I always worked, I always worked in two shops. I never just worked in one.
So like I'd work at one from like eight to five. I'd work at another one in the evenings, and then I worked at like, you know, weekends, whatever it took. So I was always working in a shop in different, different aspects of a shop. So, When I was 21, unfortunately, you know, my, my dad passed away and I started to kind of figure out like, okay, so what do I want to, what do I want to do here long term?
And I kind of stayed full-time at the dealership. And, and then it, it just, it, the, the pace of it at the time was, it, it was too hard for me to deal with that. And like, dealing with my dad's passing, it was too hard. So I went to this independent shop and something super cool, we, we did a lot of heavy trucks and we did, you know, collision repair and I was doing estimating, I was doing painting.
And we actually painted the, uh, truck that carried the very first piece of the World Trade Center memorial. Took us like nine months to restore this truck. And like, if you, there's a picture of it on my Instagram, but like, there's an eagle going down the side with an American flag. And then there's like on the one fuel tank, it's got the firemen putting the, the, uh, flag in the grounds.
And then the other side is the Statue of Liberty, like this really elaborate paint job. So, um, You know, we were doing all that stuff and, and, um, it was a great shop. I loved it. And 2009, my, my old teacher from Stevens, him and I were super close. He called and said, look, I gotta do a sabbatical. Would you wanna come in here and, and teach?
And I'm like, look, I can teach for finish, but like, I'm not, I can't fix, I don't, I don't fix cars. Like I don't do structural repairs. I can put bumpers on, I can fix, you know, scratches, ding, stuff like that. But if you put me on a frame rack, I would've totaled the car. That's still true to this day. I don't, I don't touch structural vehicles.
So they brought me in. I taught for, um, an entire semester. And so I would teach from seven to 11 and then go back to the shop, and then worked from 12 to eight. So I did it for like a good, I don't know, five months or however long it was. And at that time, I had met, um, uh, a paint rep that worked for B A S F because I had used BSF products.
And, and they worked really well for me. And he said, look, you know, Pennsylvania's getting ready to go waterborne. That's something that you would be interested to do is come, come work for us as a tech rep. So I thought about it and I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. So, um, so you know what, this, this is probably a, a cool opportunity.
So 2009, I, uh, I took a job as a A B A S F tech rep. And really the, the, from 2009 until about 2017 in Pennsylvania, I did like all the demos, the installations, the trainings for the B A S F waterborne line. And like, it was just like, really, it's like, it's so strange when you look back, I look back at my career, like I didn't ex, I never picked some of these things to have happened that, that I wound up getting involved with.
So like, probably like 2016, 2017, I got involved with the B A S F marketing department and um, I started like developing colors for some of their builders. So I started working with like kc, the guy that used to be on Gas Monkey Garage, Jonathan Gouldsby. They had this all girls, uh, build through, um, through Bogie who, who is All Girls Garage.
I did a, a color for, um, Rutledge Wood for an eBay Motors build. I started doing like all this like really interesting stuff. And then Kristen and I met from Collision Hub because, um, I went out to Arkansas to film some B A S F virtual certification videos. And so got a relationship with her and then through my jobber that I work for, I said, look, you know, did you ever get on the road and do like some of these classes, you know, that you're doing now, but in person?
And they had done 'em like at sema, but never, never, uh, on the road. So we brought 'em out and we did it. And then like Covid hit and she said, would you be interested in, in, I'm gonna start these 20 groups. Would you want to run my, uh, my paint side of things? So I did that and uh, you know, I've been doing that for the last couple years.
So, um, it's kind of cool because I have no shops all over the country and. . I work with Larry Monez frequently up in New York. And, and Jason, who is, is Kristen's kind of like head guy over there. Just the relationships have been huge and just meeting all these different shop owners and painters, you know, that just want to be the best of the best has been super cool.
So like, I mean, that's in a, in a nutshell, there's a, we could talk about this for hours, but yeah, I mean that's kind of the, the, the way it's gone for me, um, Yeah, it's just, it's just a bunch of opportunities. Like I just worked this past sema, I did a presentation with S C R S and the D EEG and, um, and B A S F.
We did a, a modern, uh, paint class at, at cmo, which went exceptionally well. So it's cool, you know, it's, it's nice to have this huge network of people, whether it be, you know, D E G S C R S with Aaron, b a s F, axon, o Bell, who I work with, Sherwin, um, the different manufacturers, you know, 3m, Norton, Sanin, Cobain, like, it's just, it's cool how big my network has gotten over the years just from meeting all these people.
That's awesome, man. Yeah, that's, I mean, if you wanna talk for hours, we certainly can. That makes my job very easy. , um, I, I'm, I'm curious. Okay, so, um, lots of different questions here. What was it like doing, going from the field and teaching. , uh, sorry, what was it like going, being in the field for a couple of years and, and, and doing what you do and then going into schools and like teaching kids?
Like what was that experience for you like? So, I, I think what was like really interesting is like, I, I have to retract way back. I mean, when I was, so my dad was super old school. He owned a business and when I was old enough to walk, he made my brother and I like come in and start like doing stuff in the business.
So I started working really young and then when I was 10 I got a paper route. and, you know, we conversed with like our neighbors and stuff like that. And, and, um, then I wound up, uh, getting a, a ca I started caddying when I was a teenager, so I would like caddy and do this paper route. Like I've had two jobs for as long as I could, could potentially remember.
And, you know, through those experiences as a young person and being around predominantly adults my entire life, it gave me a different perspective because I always loved learning. So when I was caddying and I would learn stuff from the doctors and lawyers and accountants and business owners, I learned a lot of stuff from them and I appreciated them putting time into teaching me.
My dad taught me a lot of stuff and so I always loved learning. And when I, when I got into this field, like for me, I'm level 1000 or I'm not interested in doing it. I, when I was 16, 15 years old, started getting dabbling in this business. Like I was all in. I mean, I was reading as much as I could buying collision repair books.
Like I was obsessed with it because I wanted to be the greatest version of a tech that I could possibly be. And since I've, I think what's interesting is if you really, really love to learn, at least in my case, it made me love to teach. So when they, I had a great teacher at Stevens, um, Frank Pet Patrol.
Unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago, but he was an awesome teacher and I loved the way that he went about instructing his students. So I always spent a lot of time with him. And when he called me and asked me, you know, Hey, would you want to come in and do this? And you gotta, you know, do these interviews and background checks and all this stuff, it wasn't even like a hesitation.
I was like, yeah, I can, I can do that. And um, I think the thing that is hard about it, , and this is a, you know, for a teaching perspective going into a school, I never once thought I would be a, you know, teach in a school. The thing I didn't like about it was the politics. And I learned that real fast. Like there's these upper level politics that trickle down and I was kind of like, look, I'm not built for this.
I mean, I'm here to teach these, you know, young adult males to learn a craft and a trade to help them, you know, make a successful living for their families. It's not about the, the politics. And so I think what had happened was I, I was bitten by that bug so hard of taking a kid that, you know, had some decent hand skills, but taking 'em to the next level and like doing exceptional paint jobs at a young age.
And when they had asked me to come on and be this, you know, trainer tech rep. . It just felt like a natural migration because I had this, you know, this last, you know, not a year, but I think it was, it was like, it was, it was probably five months that I spent teaching in the, in the school atmosphere. And I liked it so much that migrating into a tech role was easy.
The thing that was, that I wasn't prepared for was like, I was 25 and when I was 25, I probably looked like I was like 17 some, going into these shops with guys that were double my age, and the first thing they say is, have you ever painted a car? And I'm like, I mean, yeah. Like I, of course I've painted cars, like, why would you think I had, then I throw the gun at you and they're like, prove it
And I'm like, okay. So like I remember the first, like my first go around at, at training, we had a local shop in Lancaster. It was a dealership. It's called Lancaster Lincoln Mercury. It was the first waterborne conversion that we did, and I went in there, it was the three man paint team. All these guys were way older than me, and, and I said, look, I'm gonna, it's gonna be a hundred percent transparent with you guys.
I know this computer system, I know these undercoats, I know these clears. I know the color match process for the way that this, this company runs. I don't know this base coat because I don't know waterborne. So I talked to the, the manager and said, this is what I would like to do. Let me help them with computer system undercoats clears, picking the right variance, uh, all that stuff, but let me paint cars alongside of 'em and just let 'em split all the hours that I produce because I have to learn this base coat essentially just like they do.
Because waterborne then for us was so new. Nobody had real hardcore field experience. So I spent two weeks in this shop. and I just painted car after car, after car, after car. And by like the fifth car I painted, I'm like, this is not that. I'm much different than solvent. And um, so I I, I got it really quick and then it got me, you know, it kind of got me on the right path with those guys.
And then I adopted that model of if I have to go in and do a training, I'm just gonna paint cars with these guys. I'm not gonna be the guy standing outside in, you know, in a button down the shirt. Like, I'm just gonna paint cars with you. And I think that there's a ton of value in that. And, and for guys that are tech wrapping now, it's like you, you gotta get in there with them, help 'em tape cars up, help 'em prep, have conversations with them.
So I think that that migration for me, that really helped a lot to, to teach kids and then flip it. Cuz there's guys now that are 40 years old and I'm 25 and I gotta teach them. It's just, and I said, guys, look, I, I'm not here to teach you how to paint cars. You know how to do that. I'm not, I'm not your vo-tech instructor.
I'm here to teach you a paint system. And I always stuck by that. Like, I, you, you chose this as your profession. You know what you're doing and I am just here to show you how to use this, this paint line. And I think that worked really well. So to this day, I enjoy it. Like I enjoy getting on the C 20 group and doing my monthly classes and teaching those guys.
It's just, it's something I love doing. I love working with people and, and I still learn, I mean, I learned from other painters and other distributors and, and other paint manufacturers. Like, I like to be able to get that knowledge and, and pass that on to, to the next generation. Did you, so after that first initial shop, which I imagine that you probably garnered a lot of respect from those guys because you were just upfront and transparent with them and said, Hey, like, I'm kind of in the same situation as you guys.
I might know a little bit more of the technical side, um, and technical info of this stuff than you guys do. However, like technical info only goes so far, , like, and then you, then you have to actually spray it, right? Right. Um, , but you getting in there and, and getting some booth time with them and spraying right beside 'em or whatever, and them seeing, and you guys kind of going through the same challenges together.
If there were challenges, um, I'm sure that was a hell of a lot more respectful from, um, you got a lot more respect from them on that than you going in there and saying, Hey, it's basically the same. Just, here's the stuff. You should be fine. Just hit me up. If you have problems, I'm out. And then just leave.
Right. Um, oh, for sure. The next couple of shops that you did though, did you run into a lot of guys that were just really resistant to the process of going from solvent to water and you know, just called you out a bunch or anything like that? What was, what was that experience like for you? So we, you know, in the early days of water, um, we did a lot of, a lot of.
Backdoor research to make sure that we set, set these guys up for success. So like, we would go in, we would test their air, have conversations with the painters, look at their mixing rooms. It's all about, it was about, you know, getting off on the right foot with these guys cuz this is a major cultures change.
It didn't matter if they were staying within, you know, that particular brand's paint and just switching to water or switching brands to us and going to our water, which is a, a whole different process. Um, but basically, you know, it was all about, I I, I hate buzzwords or just like, I don't like cliche buzzwords.
But it, back then, you know, it was all about transparency because, you know, I always took it very seriously. Like this guy in this shop, whether he is a flat rate painter, an owner, uh, whatever it is. Like this guy needs this paint to put food on his family's table. And I take that very seriously. And for me, you know, I always wanted to find out what the concerns were up front.
So like, you know, what, what are you most nervous about? What are you most excited about? And that's, that was the important steps to take. And I still think that's important steps to take when, when you're dealing with someone who doesn't know you, they don't know who I am. They've never seen me before.
They don't know if I can paint. They don't know if I just went to college and applied for this job and now I have it because I was, you know, whatever the, my backstory is. So when, when it came, when it came down to, to the shops there afterwards, what I would like to do is, is I would go in and like, it didn't matter if they were just changing from solvent to water in the line or going from brand to brand.
It's like, let's do a couple demos. Let's paint cars together. It gives me time to get to know you. You get to know me. You can see before this paint even hits your shop that I'm capable of, of troubleshooting for you, fixing colors for you, uh, all that stuff. So you really gotta build. The whole thing is about building trust before you even go in.
And then once we would do the install, it's like, refresh the mixing room. This is their home away from home. These guys are spending 50 hours a week here. So, you know, what do they need to make their work life a better place to be? So it's, it's more than just the stuff inside the can. Anybody can sell you good paint.
I mean, it's, everybody makes good paint. People that say that the, that someone else's pain is junk is not, it's just not true. Where's the, um, where's the things outside of that that that's what matters to to me. So I would always try to go. and find out what they need and what their expectations were and just set 'em up for, for success because I understand their concerns.
Cuz I'm still a painter at heart. I mean, I, I still paint now. I mean, a guy that I used to work with. We paint boats. I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll be a painter forever. Hmm. Very interesting. Um, so let's talk a little bit about this. Um, so you're, you're a rep for, um, you still are a rep going around selling paint, um, working with shops and everything like that.
And then, um, uh, who was the, sorry if I'm forgetting, but who was the gal that you met from Collision Hub? It was Oh, Christy Felder. Yep. Kristen Felder. Um, how did that, um, relationship kind of come around? . So there, there's a lady that works for B A S F, she's, she's the, she runs their marketing for the, the refiner side.
Her name is Tina Nellis. And I met Tina Nellis. It was like really bizarre. Um, it was probably like 2015 or so. She, she was into powerboats and I was, and I was like painting power boats and I'd done a whole bunch of like crazy powerboat projects and I had always used B A S F on all these paint jobs. So she called me and said, Hey, my husband and I are buying this cigarette boat and I'm kind of looking for some input on, on products and, and what to use.
So because she was marketing and, you know, her technical team at the time was, you know, they're very much for refin and like I, I love going outside of the realm of normalcy. So I'm like, well this is how I do all the boats with B A S F and this is how they've always worked. And so her and I got this like super cool relationship.
And then she would start calling me randomly for like, just technical stuff that, that was outside of the realm of automotive or finished aka a like collision repair. So like a lot of the stuff that these builders would do, there's no technical data on it because it's essentially breaking all the rules of standard collision repair.
So I would tell her like, yeah, you can use this Clear to do that. And uh, this primer surfacer works really well. So when her and I got this relationship going, um, we were at Northeast Trade Show in like 2015 or 16, and that's when Casey Matthew had left Gas Monkey Garage and she said, Hey, he's gonna be here.
Uh, he's thinking about going to B A S F. Can you come have dinner with us? So my wife and I, we were up. . We had dinner with him and him and I hit it off really well. And so he said, look, I wanna make this switch, but I want you to come out and be the one to train me. So I'm like, well, look, I don't know if I can do that.
I gotta run it by Tina. So we figured it all out. I flew out to, um, to Dallas and we did, uh, a bunch of paint jobs with, with Onyx at the time with Casey. And so then he would fly me out there a couple times a year and he, his YouTube channel at the time was like on fire because he was putting a lot of effort into it.
So I would fly out and him and his guy Eric, like, we would film all kinds of stuff. There's a guy named Ron Cone that used to work. He was in a show called Mob Steel or Detroit Speed with Mob Steel. And so him and I would go out and then like we would, you know, do all kinds of, of stuff for the YouTube channel.
We did a bunch of instructional videos and Kristen and I had met because, um, once again, like she was doing a lot of the, the marketing and, and teaming up with B A S F. So her and I got to know each other really well and, um, . So her and I just made this, made this great relationship out of the gate because, you know, she grew up as in a body shop and painting and like, I essentially grew up body shop and painting and um, you know, she would call me for one-off questions and I would call her for like one-off questions and then we would see each other at trade shows.
And, um, yeah, I mean it just, the, the relationship just kind of slowly grew over time. And then once I flew out, like they needed somebody to go out to film these training videos and build the storyboard for, um, the B A S F recertification videos. And Tina was like, look, I really want you to do this. Can you do it?
Um, so I flew out and I did it, and it was kind of cool because even though I was a, a technical person for B A S F through this job, or I wasn't B A S F employed, so I had a little bit of more wiggle. , um, because I wasn't like strangled held by a manufacturer and I would say, look, this is the recommendation that I'll make to you because I know that this works, but you're not gonna see this in writing when you work for a manufacturer.
You can't do that stuff. So like, you know, 3M or Norton or somebody may know one of those tech guys may know factually that this process works, but unless it's been run through the ringer by the chemist and the laboratory, like they can't go out and tell you to do that. So I'll say like, Hey, requisite, this process has works for me for the last 10 years and I know this works.
But just understand that this is not a warrantied system where B A S F doesn't recognize the ability to do this. Like, I'll give you an example. A lot of your builders, they'll put on five or six coats of clear back to back and they'll start like when you see a super straight car that just looks like a mirror, a lot of people think they keep sanding them and you're clearing 'em.
That's not what happens. They put a ton of clear on, they start block blocking that clear down with like 400 grit. And they guide code between steps. Well, if you try to put three coats of clear on, you're, after the second step of standing, you're, you're through it. So we kind of figured out, okay, what BSA products can I take to that limit to allow them to do this where I can put seven coats on potentially and use this clear like a body filler where I'm gonna level it and then polish it up.
So that's where I got involved, where, you know, I knew how far to take it. And then Kristen and I, um, you know, just, well, we like to break the rules a little bit, but then also stay in line. Interesting. So how did the, how did the 20 group part of it come around then? So, I, I can't remember if, I think it might have, I think she was working on it right before, right before Covid hit, and then when Covid hit, it was like, all right, thi like, this thing needs to happen because there are people that are stuck at home for X amount of weeks or months or whatever.
Um, I think it was, I think it was pre covid. I, I don't want to say the wrong information and say something wrong, but I think it caught, maybe, caught more fire then because like we, we had to do this. But she had called me one day and said, would you be interested in, she's like, I'm gonna start this, this the C 20 group.
We're gonna have an owner's group, we're gonna have an estimators group, we're gonna have a technician's group, we're gonna have a painter's group. Would you be interested in running the painter's group? So we talked a little bit about it and, and I'm like thinking, man, how am I gonna do this? Like, you know, with my job, cause this is, you know, develop the information, make the PowerPoint.
Like this is a, this is a big venture to, to take on and it's do this job. Yeah. I want to, I wanna do it really well. So, um, you know, I thought, I, I really don't want to have to do this, you know, uh, evenings and weekends cause I'm already doing my own stuff with, you know, kind of like that and, and how, how could I potentially do this?
So, Um, I worked out a, a deal with her to where, um, I basically do it on, on the company time that, that I work for now. And then I use those modules that I build for Collision Hub to do training for my local customers and our sales team and our tech team. So that's kind of how it happened. And it's interesting, like if you would look back in on the World fair, there's a, um, collision Hub, did a World Fair for a couple years and I'm, they're probably gonna keep doing them, but the first one we flew out, me and, uh, a couple of the guys from Sada flew out there.
And, um, we did, we did one, we used a couple of my, uh, presentations and did, we did this presentation that I built. It was a four, four part presentation on essentially color. And it was all about light sources and Kelvin and c r i ratings. And it was about, um, the chemistry and adjusting color. I mean, it was intense to where like, it, it, it got a lot of publicity because no one had ever looked at.
Color and color theory to this magnitude. And, um, it, it really, I think it really took that group and caught that group on fire because people were like, wait a minute, this isn't stuff I'm gonna read in Fender Bread. I'm not gonna read this in body shop business. Like this stuff is, this information is way out there.
I was very blessed to have, you know, with my relationships with some of the pink companies that I'd run into weird situations where it's like, why does this happen in a shop? Like, okay, we know the generic term of, okay, the, the solvent was trapped or whatever, but like, what is the chemical reason this stuff happened?
So I started integrating in these classes, a lot of chemistry based training. . Um, in high school, I was obsessed with, with chemistry, like it was chemistry and, and accounting were, were huge for me. And so when I started accessing these chemists and they're telling me this stuff and then I would start researching it, it like blew my mind.
So when you would look at the C 20 group, the refinished class, the re refin class that we do now, um, a lot of it is, it really is chemistry based because these guys, these guys want to be the absolute best of the best. And they don't want to just have elementary education. They want to know, like, they almost want it to be too much.
Like this is, this is, this is too far, this is too deep. That's what they want. Um, and, and that's what we do. So I think that's the interesting thing about this, the, the re refinish group is that there is so much, um, information there that takes, like I know that the, the four part series I did on color, I have a hundred hours of research in making that class.
Um, Yeah, it, it's really intense. So that's not just like me Googling things, that's me calling chemists and people from 3M and calling, I called light manufacturers. Cause that had to understand the difference between, okay, well what about, I hear about Lumens and Kelvin, but like, okay, now we have cr, I, now we have spectral curves, now we have wavelengths and nanometers.
Like, I needed to understand all this stuff at a super high level so that I could build a presentation that made these painters understand, you know what, there was way more to me looking at a color, but if I understand the technicality of looking at color and I simplify it in my paint shop, and now I don't have color problems anymore, or my color problems are super far between, like, I don't even really think about it because I built processes around it.
That's what we tried to do. And um, we just took it, we just took it to a. A level that was so far out there that it's, I don't, to this day, I don't know anybody else that's doing the stuff that we're doing in that group. Hey guys. Adam from the podcast. I hope you are enjoying today's episode. Just wanted to ask you a quick favor.
If the show has brought you value in some way, would you mind giving us a review and sharing the show? It really helps the show get out there. Also, if you are looking to expand the services that your shop offers and you want to do more than collision work, you should really check out our company Clarity Coat.
Clarity Coat is a peelable paint that allows body shops to offer color changes cheaper than a repaint, while still looking like real paint. You can also offer clear protection that has no edges and is sprayed instead of laid. Unlike vinyl and P ppf, clarity code can be sanded and polished so you can give your customer the exact look that they are wanting.
If you are looking to expand your shop services, go to clarity code.com and fill out our Become an installer form. Alright, let's get back to the show. So you are the type of guy that you want to. way, dive in deep, like to the deepest deeps that is out there, and then cherry pick the information, simplify it down to, um, deliver the best possible education and everything like that to the guy who, because I would, would you think it's fair to say that 90 to 95% of the guys that you run across every single day outside of this 20 group just want the shit to work and they don't really care to know most of the chemistry or anything like that, but when they run into a problem, you're now able to go back to this knowledge bank and say, okay, I know exactly why you're having this, this, and this problem.
And then again, you can distill it down into some basic information of, well, this is why you're running into this problem. If you adjusted these two, three things, then you're not gonna have this problem anymore and here's kind of the reason why. And then that's a hundred percent is accurate. Um, exactly.
Fair to say. We, uh, you're exactly right. Um, and like I'll tell you how, I'll tell you how far I take this. So I did a class, um, we did a class on UV technology and the thing that I started researching was the individual paint companies and how they provide curing documentation for UV tech in different facets.
Some of 'em didn't give the power of the light, some of 'em give a distance, some of 'em give a time. And I started to narrow this thing down to actual scientific measurements and terminology to make sure that whatever paint lines UV product you are using, I can take the light source that you're potentially thinking about using to cure.
reverse engineer the data for it and then tell you what distance and for how much time it takes to cure that individual product. And the reason I say it takes, like, this is how far I go, is, uh, my brother and sister-in-law are both engineers for Tesla. So when I get something that's like really out there, like, okay, these are like e equals mc square type equations, like beyond my comprehension, I'll call 'em and I'm like, look, okay, what does this actually mean?
So this, um, this UV class I did, I called my sister-in-law because I started learning about this millijoules term, which is essentially it's a transfer of energy over a, uh, over, uh, a footprint for a dictation of time. And I'm like, how do, okay? I'm like, listen, Brie, I don't understand how to word this, like word this to me like I'm in fifth grade because I can't wrap my head around it.
So once she explained it to me, I was able to say, okay, this is how it works. Here's the, the, the equations it takes. This is how you do this. So then I built Excel programs to give to our guys in C 20 that says, okay, if you have this specific, whatever your light brand is for UV cure, you put in these data points and then it's gonna sum up what your distance is and how long the cure time is gonna be.
So to your point, a guy that doesn't know any of this stuff goes in, puts UV primer down, does a cure the way it says in the tech data sheets. And after the car is assembled, the UV primer starts peeling and he just wants to know why it's peeling. Well, I'm taking it to the point where we're not either gonna get there because let's do all the r and d ahead of time so that I know that if I'm gonna use this UV primer with this particular tool, this is how I'm gonna cure it.
Um, . So that's how far we take this stuff. It is to paint companies, to their credit, they wanna simplify it. And I get that. I mean, if you read a recipe to make a cake, that's gonna tell you, okay, these are the eight steps to do it. We're not gonna put in 27 steps, uh, of measuring your oven temperature and checking how long it stays there.
For this period of time we're doing that, we're taking it to the next level because in my opinion, some of this stuff that exists and, and the paint world and the chemistry world is just extremely advanced. So I want to go right between super high advanced and right between elementary and figure out how we make that the standard, because the more a shop knows, the better they are.
Like one of my favorite things when you start talking about waterborne, um, with waterborne, we. solvent used to leave solvent. The solvents would, you know, leave, they would leave the film. We're dehydrating that base coat, waterborne base coat needs to dehydrate. We need to whip the water away from it. So we did an entire class on the, on dehydration of waterborne base coat and what that looks like and what that means.
So it's really just taking things, um, and, and determining how far we, we over, we don't want to overcomplicate it because then nobody understands it. Um, we take the overcomplicated data and then simplify that, but go a couple steps above a regular tech data sheet. Uh, I imagine that there are a lot of people listening right now that are just rolling their eyes and they're just like, yeah, Jesus dude.
Like, just put the pain on the car and just, and just bake the shit. And they just call it a day. But, , I would, I would venture to guess this. Um, I don't look at stuff like this as necessarily useless information. I, for me personally, I, you get to, you get to a point where like, agree, there's kind of like a point of an overturned just with all knowledge and things, right?
Um, it's a bell curve, but what I find interesting is most of the time when you come across people that have a very, oh, I, I don't need to know about this. Like, just whatever, just put the stuff on the card, just be done with it. Um, they're also the ones that as soon as something doesn't work, it's the product's fault or the, you can tell they get frustrated because they just, they, they don't have any idea why they're running into these issues.
And I think what's interesting is the people that do just. even. Even if you were to go just a little bit below surface level and figure out stuff, there is a whole bunch of combination of things and scenarios that you're gonna, that you can have someone throw at you and you'd be like, oh yeah, I know that's why that's happening.
And then you've now become just God, like you're just like the guy to go to. And then it's just interesting because a lot of people would fix a lot of their issues if they would just dive a little bit more than surface level and dive into like how something works, why it works that way and everything.
So with the, as an example, with this UV curing and everything, I would imagine, so obviously on the one end you have, okay, well you didn't let it cure long enough or improperly cured, so now it's peeling up. But then on the other end, the general fix to that, for most people that I've run across is, okay, well then just.
Throw it at it longer. Just, uh, it says to, it says to do it for an hour, we're gonna do it for four because more is better. Right? And then what happens is four works. And they're like, cool. I was right. I didn't like, that was the fix. Bingo. But now you're talking about bingo inefficiencies, right? You're talking about three, three hours that you, it could have been, it could have been something as simple as, well actually you needed an hour and a half instead of just an hour.
Because at that, there's a critical point where it, it gets to the point where it's, it's now done and cured, and now you can just leave it. And all you needed was 30 minutes more. But now you're, you're two and a half hours inefficient. And that in a, in an industry, in a service-based industry, like what we're talking about, it's just, that's just an unacceptable level of inefficiency.
Um, so I always find it interesting that. With any product out there and any process you're going to have, especially in the United States, um, which, you know, we do have some international people, but what people internationally need to understand is that the amount of variance there is in climate, just in the United States would blow people's minds, uh, internationally anyways.
You have incredibly humid weather down south. You have incredibly dry weather, I don't know, Arizona. Arizona, like, uh, in the Southwest, um, incredibly dry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But as for someone who dives just a little bit deeper than surface level, you can make these small adjustments and say, oh, you've got 25, 40% more humidity over here.
Here's what you're gonna have to count for and adjust for. Um, uh, what's your, what's your thoughts on, so I can give you an example of exactly what you just said. . Um, and this relates to every single person that paints a car in the United States of America. So one of the things that's, that's happening is the paint company's cost to make chips, right?
Chips that are supposed to match a formula or ovarian is astronomical. The cost of chip production that are non printed, that are sprayed is absolutely unbearable. So the paint companies over the last several years have invested a ton of resource and a ton of time in spectometer, or you can call it a color camera, and that technology.
So that being said, the camera technology is so advanced right now that. The vast majority of paint manufacturers, their end game is to get rid of color chips and to do 100% digital match. They can give you a better, faster match and give you a toll that they can update. That is not an antiquated chip that costs a huge amount of money.
You look at Teslas, you can update that vehicle through your wifi, and it's more advanced than buying the next year model because I can do it like that. If I have to wait for variance chips four times a year. By the time I got the variance chip, it's already been out for three months. So this is where I'm going with this.
If I look at the United States on a map and I look at Pittsburgh, if I look at Detroit, Michigan, if I look at Seattle, Washington, Miami, Florida, the climates. and industries and those areas are so different that here is a huge thing that we teach in in C 20 or finish in Collision Hub, that the pink companies were like, Ugh, we actually didn't think about this.
So we have a little known phenomenon where I live and in Detroit and a couple other areas called industrial fallout rail dust. You cannot pick rail dust up with a naked eye, can't see it. The cameras, the way at which they're magnifying a pearl, a Micah, a flake, a pigment is a hundred times more powerful than what you can see with your eyeball.
So with that being said, if I have a car from 2018 where I live, and I'm gonna bring it in, And I'm gonna do the prep on the hood to do a camera shot. Paint company says tri act, it, uh, polish it, um, glaze it, do your camera shot. That's fine if you're in Miami, Florida. But what if you're in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia or, or Detroit, where I now have a piece of metal particulate, most likely, lots of them, aka rail dust embedded in that paint.
And I take a camera shot of it. The camera is going to pick it up. So what do I need to do? If I'm in an area like that, I have to claybar that car first. The spot that I'm gonna camera shot. My first stat needs to be claybar to take the contam. I gotta decontaminate that paint to take it back to o e M.
Then I sand it, then I compound it, then I glaze it. Now I have a pure formm O eem finish. Just take a camera shot of. It is proven over and over and over again that if you do that in an area like where I live, I'm not sure hu is where you live, um, where that is going to be a difference between a blendable match from a camera shot versus I'm gonna do a camera shot and then spend two hours tinning it because the industrial fallout, that's just one micro example of, of what can happen when we're not aware of our environment.
If I take Miami, Florida, I got the same car from 2018, is that I do in, in Pennsylvania. The difference I have there is that I don't have industrial fallout, but I'm gonna have way more UV deterioration. So because of the environment that I'm in, I really need to look at these individual panels and look at my prep process differently than a guy in Pennsylvania or a guy in New York City.
So the environment is huge. Um, you know, and yeah. You talked about U Ofv. Absolutely. There's a, there's a shop out in Dallas, Texas. Because they have sun a lot all day long where they can cure their UV primers outside in about 25 minutes and you can probably bet all your money on it. The majority of days you're gonna be able to do that.
Pennsylvania, we're gonna have a snow day or where you are in Dakota snow day, overcast for a month. I can't, there's no way I can come up with a process for that. So the whole thing about this is about, is about building a process that's repeatable regardless of your weather conditions where you live regardless of your environment.
Because we're all different. So if you're in Pennsylvania or Florida or Texas or Washington or Dakota or or Michigan, do your process the same with every single car. And that way I don't worry about these little nuances cuz I'm gonna take that vehicle back to OEM or I'm gonna cure my product the same way every single time.
Well, and not only that, but you know, we've all seen the picture of like the silver chip on a silver car and they have like six of 'em right there. And they's like. Yeah, I don't know. Like, I don't know which one this is supposed to be, you know, that type of thing. And so just from that one singular aspect, like you're, you're going to either fix or greatly reduce the chances of error on that.
But I'm just sitting here thinking to myself like the amount of data that, um, paint companies or, well, I'll just go off of paint. Companies are gonna be able to pull from something like a camera is insane because what they're gonna be able to do then is they're gonna be able to, so let's just say, you know, within, let's say within the first three months of something like this coming out and going mass, mass market, right?
Within a couple of months, they're gonna be able to say, okay, we had a hundred cars all over the US that were the same make model, build time, everything like that. So you can make a relative statement that they were sup, they were basically the exact same. Panel all the way across the board. But when the shop up in Detroit painted, um, painted it, it aired, there was, there was this, there was these errors that happened and then when down in Miami there was these things that happened and blah, blah, blah.
And then you can start to build out a system where when you put that camera on that panel, um, one, it either gives you a procedure of, okay, you live in the, you live in the north, um, north central, Northeast, central North. I don't know what you guys would call it up there, , sorry, , the Northeast, uh, you guys live up here.
Here's your steps that you have to do in order to prep this panel for this. Whereas down in Miami, um, okay, so you can make a fair statement that they have a lot of salt water, right? So maybe they want to do an acid bath Exactly. Previous to that to get rid of all the, um, all the salts, right? Um, so there's, there's your differences in prep, depending on your shop, where you're located in, blah, blah, blah.
But then also take a shot of that and now it's gonna spit out two different results for the Northeast versus this, um, south, uh, southeast Florida. You need a little bit more of this because you have a little bit more UV exposure. And if you don't do it, then maybe your whites are gonna come out maybe just a tad more yellow than they're supposed to be because of whatever reason.
And then in the north, um, east, you guys are gonna have to do this, this, and this a little bit differently. You can start to just like adjust these tiny little things over time to get a way better result and way better efficiencies, which I dunno for people they're thinking like, man, you guys are like really overthinking this
Well, I mean, you, you could make that argument, but I would rather, again, going back to like, maybe it's the German in me, but I would just really would rather have something extremely efficient, um, and not have to second guess myself and know that it's done right versus. sitting there scratching my head like, I really don't know why this happened like this.
And this is really annoying to me. And then I, it's funny cause I'm, I'm super German too, and like I, I, um, I work with the guys from SAD a lot. I mean, I, I, I, um, I've done a couple videos with those guys just on air movers and, um, you know, spray gun technology and they got a, an incredibly, incredibly smart group of guys that work for them.
Um, you know, I, I don't know if you could have a better team, uh, for s spray gun equipment than you do for what we have available through Dan Am, um, with, with that soda team and, um, I think that those guys are in that same, you know, school of thought where. When you learn about the way that those guns are manufactured in Germany and you say, I don't understand, like how is this gun $1,200?
I would've questioned that myself 15 years ago. But now that I know the way those guns are machined and the fine tuning in them, and when you're talking about 0.001% differentiation because the complexity of paint finished and you got a 46 V Mazda, you're gonna wish that you had your thousand dollars gun that was built to do this as opposed to your Harbor freight $200 gun.
And don't understand why the car's blotchy or why it's too dark because of the over-engineering that they're doing at, at the s spray gun level. Um, and and I think that when you're over-engineering it, cause we don't have to know all the specifics of, of the soda measurements and, and all those things, but I want to be confident.
That the company I'm buying from over-engineered it so that when I go to do my job, it's simplified cuz they did all the hard work. And what we're trying to do is say, okay, the paint companies are, do a great job. Every paint company out there does a good job with, with their information. I just want to say, you know what, why don't we just take it one more step?
Um, and that, like I said, the clay bar thing is a great example. Hey, I'm a rep for x, y, Z paint company. I predominantly do New York and Pennsylvania and I'm gonna make sure that my guys know, look, you know, we have rail dust, we have industrial fault, we have all this stuff. Make sure you clay bar that car before you do this.
Um, and then one of the things, I'm a huge fan of his imagery. So like I have a, um, I have this magnifying glass, um, or not magnifying glass, a um, a uh, a magnifying camera that I use to photograph panels at a super deep level. Like I think I'm taking 'em at like. It's a couple hundred x. So I'm able to take panels that you would say, oh yeah, like, that looks good.
I would camera shoot that. And I used a bunch of examples that show you that it's not even close to ready for a camera shot, but we have to understand that we cannot see that. So the average human being, and it's no fault of us, it's any paint rep, a tech rep, you or I would look at it and say, oh, absolutely, that thing's ready for a camera shot.
Until I take and diagnose that thing deeper and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, there's no way I can go to good reading on this because I compounded it and I have all these crazy, uh, lines in it. The camera's gonna pick the lines up and it's gonna think it's either, uh, pearl, it's gonna think it's a, a metallic, it's gonna think it's something wrong with the panel and gimme a poor match, because I didn't understand what the camera was seeing.
So we're trying to simplify we're we're over complicating it to simplify it. Yep. Yeah. And your example about the guns, to me, Yes. What you're doing there is you're eliminating variables. So, uh, a lot of times for me, when it comes down to efficiencies, it's about eliminating variables. Um, so you have a piece of equipment that, you know, it's a good piece of equipment for about 70 to 80% of the time, but then that 20% of the time it's something's off with it, which then makes you slower, which then makes you more frustrated, which then makes you less money.
So if you're, if you're eliminating, like, okay, let's take the, let's take the camera as an example. 90% of the time you might be able to get away with Yep. Not prepping the panel as good as you possibly could. Right. And 90% of the time, you're probably gonna be fine. Now what you're overconfident in is that because of that 90%, you're like, ah, yep, Danen, he doesn't know what he's talking about.
I'm like, fuck that guy. But then you get that 10% where. One out of a hundred jobs, you, you get a misreading, which means then you have to repaint the car, which means now you're eight, eight hours behind and you've just, it, it just comes down to risk versus reward, right? You, you're gonna get away with it a lot of the times, most likely, but then that one time that it doesn't, you don't get away with it, was it?
You just have to ask yourself, was it really worth that? Was it really worth you cutting, quote unquote cutting that corner if you want to, if you want to kind of label it that way. Um, yeah, man, very interesting stuff and, uh, probably have to have you back on the show at some point to talk, to go a little bit deeper into some of these topics because I feel like we could probably just take a topic and then just take a second part.
Yeah, we can do that. I mean, it's, um, you can go from there. You know, this, this stuff gets, this stuff gets super deep. Like, I'll, I'll give you an example. Um, , do you ever hear the term sova chromatic? Does it, do you ever, have you ever heard that term, sova chromatic? So basically what the term sova, chromatic means is that, um, if you take a pigment, it will change its color based on the liquid that you let it down with.
So when I say let down, I mean reduce it with, so if I take a, a pigment and I reduce it out with, uh, acetone alcohol, um, water, gasoline, whatever, a liquid, and, and, and reduce it out, it can have an impact on the way that the color, the final color appears. So there is this insane example of it that you'll, you'll never see this in collision repair, but there's, there is an element that exists called brooker's marrow signing.
And essentially what it is, is the most salvato chromatic, uh, Pigment that you could even see. So when you let it down with individual products, it will go from purple to yellow to orange, to green to red. I mean, it changes that much. So when, when I did this color class, wow, I said, look, this is not gonna happen in your, in your paint shop, but here's what you need to understand.
What will happen is you have a, and this is kind of the engineering behind the education. So a paint rep comes in and you're using X brand of OEM approved paint and it's awesome. And that painter owner decided that they were gonna use this cheaper reducer. Like, oh, the cheaper, it's 30 bucks. And this guy from so-and-so told me it's the exact same thing, and your reducer is a hundred dollars.
Okay, well this is what we have to understand, that a hundred dollars reducer that was built to function with that paint, the results are predictable. . So if I take this unknown solvent, that is supposed to be the exact same, if there's one difference in it and it reacts incorrectly to one of your pigments and you start having color issues, who is the blame?
So it's just a little micro example of a paint company comes in and says, don't do this. And you say, why? And they say, cuz you're not supposed to. Well, I would rather tell you a super deep example of why Google broker's mari sanding look it up and you'll be like, oh, well Sova chromatic things are real. I probably shouldn't do this.
Obviously warranties and things like that. But you can, you can be more impactful with somebody using a visual than you can just saying, well void your warranty. Forget the warranty. I don't wanna have to reshoot the side of a car. . Yeah. And I can tell you from experience that yeah, American painters were like the answer.
Trust me, bro, is probably the biggest thing. And trust me, bro, is like the, is like the they don't now. Right? Where'd you hear that at? Trust me, bro. No, let me just show you the facts. Like, let's just talk about the facts. They don't need to trust me. I'm just gonna show you . Yeah, yeah. Uh, Danny, it is been an absolute pleasure having you on.
I, I feel like I've just sat, sat in class and just absorbed a ton of information. Um, is there anywhere there, is there anywhere that, uh, people can follow along with you and you have some of this info put out there and, you know, I, um, people can just, so like my Facebook is, is, you know, pretty, uh, you know, it's like, it's personal, it's not, not super, uh, business related.
Um, my, our company's Everman autobody supplies our Facebook there is, is is solid. Put a lot of information up there. Um, my Instagram tends to be a little bit more automotive related. My LinkedIn is, is, you know, more networking, things like that. But yeah, I mean, if you want to get super deep dive and you're a painter and you want to learn some of the stuff we're talking about, the Collision Hub C 20 group, um, you know, that that's where we do all this stuff.
And, uh, you know, the membership, I think it's like, I think they charge 50 bucks a month. It's like it's a no-brainer. Um, if anybody ever needs help, um, I'm always a a, a social media message away. I never, never have an issue with, um, talking to somebody over messenger if they need something. Perfect man.
Well, uh, guys, go head up, um, Damian and check out his socials. Uh, check out that 20 group. See, dive into the rabbit hole and see what, uh, see what you can blow your mind with. But uh, yeah man, I really appreciate you coming on today, and spend you spend some time with us. Blowing our minds, melting mine. I'm gonna have to go and just like I don't sit at corner.
Thanks Adam. Appreciate it bud. Think about my life decisions , but uh, yeah man, I really appreciate you coming on. You've been listening to the Autobody podcast presented by Clarity Code. Our passion is to talk to and about anyone in the industry, from painters, body guys, manufacturers, and anyone in between.
We hope you've enjoyed the show. Make sure to like rate and review and we'll be back soon. But in the meantime, visit us@claritycoat.com and find us on Facebook and YouTube at Clarity Coat. See you next time on the Autobody Podcast.