Verify In Field: The Millwork Podcast

Curing the Bottleneck: Finishing Innovation with Ryan Randell

• Marketing • Season 2 • Episode 21

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In this episode of Verify In Field, host Jacob Edmond is joined by Ryan Randell, National Director at Elevated Finishing, to dive deep into one of the most overlooked, and most painful, parts of a shop’s workflow: finishing. 

From long cure times to inconsistent results, finishing can often feel like a mysterious “black art.” But Ryan brings clarity, process, and serious innovation to the conversation, introducing us to a game-changing solution: the SCHUBOX. Designed for real-world millwork and cabinetry shops, this compact, catalytic IR curing system slashes drying times, eliminates bottlenecks, and makes finishing predictable. 

Whether you're struggling with air-dry lag, overwhelmed by rework, or just tired of crowding your shop with drying racks, this episode offers insight into how smarter curing can transform production flow and profitability. 

About Our Guest 

Ryan Randell is the National Director at Elevated Finishing and a long-time expert in the world of finishing and coatings. His journey, from remodeling contractor roots to application engineering at Stiles Machinery, gave him hands-on insight into the real challenges millwork and cabinetry shops face daily. Now, he leads Elevated Finishing’s mission to bring European-style catalytic IR technology to the U.S. market through their signature product, the SCHUBOX. 

Where to Learn More 

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Ryan Randell

When you get into finishing like people's like. I don't know. It's a black art. It depends on my coating, it depends on the humidity, it depends on my catalyst, it depends on my mill thickness. It depends on all these things that sometimes feel like they're outta control of it, you know? It's like, well, whatever happens happens, we just gotta get it finished. And we say like, that's probably one of the most important parts of your process. It's what everyone touches and sees and feels. And, we've seen that it's just a battle for so many shops. Like getting, finishing right is such a battle

Jacob Edmond

Welcome back everybody to verify and field. Today I have Ryan Randall, who is the National Director at Elevated Finishing with us, and we're gonna talk about some of the neat products they have the SCHUBOX being one of'em. And thank you for joining us today, Ryan.

Ryan Randell

Yeah, no problem Jacob. Thanks for having me on, man.

Jacob Edmond

So yeah. I think to get started, would you mind just giving a little bit of background on your, how you got into the finishing industry and the millwork industry?

Ryan Randell

Sure. Yeah. It's been a long, circuitous route to get here. I didn't start in this field about 12, 13 years ago now. Working actually at a tobacco facility here in Winston. And I wanted to do something different. So I got into computer programming actually is weird enough. And have you ever heard of those boot camps where you can, go six months, learn how to code, get a job, all that stuff. You heard of those?

Jacob Edmond

Yeah.

Ryan Randell

Yeah. So I did one of those and worked out fine. Made it through, got a job. Crazy is, I dunno, three months later. The whole company shut down. So

Jacob Edmond

Wow.

Ryan Randell

dead instantly without a job. And so was just looking for something to do, honestly. Had a young family, needed to get just busy. And I've always worked with my hands. My dad was a contractor remodeling, exterior work. I just always been busy in that and saw a job with a company called Styles Machinery, who I, I know you're familiar with, as an application engineer. And so. I said, Hey, I'll learn something new. And so I went in there and started worked in the finishing lab and the sanding lab ran demonstrations, and that's really where I got my feet wet. And paid my dues in the finishing world and learned a lot about reciprocator, learned a lot about sanders, learned a lot about coatings. Just learned a lot about, the industry, period. And had a lot of great mentors along the way. I was there, and that's kind of where I started, that's where my that's where I learned about the industry and the work finishing.

Jacob Edmond

Awesome. So, from there, did you go straight from stylists to elevated to finishing?

Ryan Randell

No. So what we did I worked for Styles for quite a while and, I had an opportunity with a paint company, actually rent coatings and started with them. I worked for them about a year. And it was fine. It was a good job, learned a ton about coatings, but just wasn't really what fit me very well. And so, Lance and Kobe Johnson with Advanced Machinery, who was a styles dealer and I had known them for years. We did demonstrations. I went out there when I was selling paint and traveled around and they began importing SCHUBOX I don't know, four or five years ago, wildly successful with it. And so one day when I was out there with them, we just, Lance actually said, Hey, you know, an idea. We talked about it for, a few months, kind of what it would look like to bring the SCHUBOXES the rest of the US market. This is where we ended up elevated finishing. We put together this company and so now we, the US importer to the US of SCHUBOXES So that's kind of where we, long story short, that's where we started.

Jacob Edmond

Awesome. So yeah, I guess that's a good segway. You mentioned the SCHUBOX, and so this is a product that you guys. Are the importers and sell and implement these things. I saw that's how we met at IWF. You guys had the SCHUBOX there, and so it is a relatively new product in the US market, as you mentioned, but it was originally, it's been in Europe for a while, I assume.

Ryan Randell

Yeah, so the SCHUBOX, the technology itself catalytic IR has been around 15, 20 years. It's not a brand new technology. It's iterated to get better and better, but it's not a brand new technology. And Schubert's is a UK based company. And it's like their fourth generation now that they're on it. It's been very successful over there for years. They went into Canada first and then hesitant to get the US market at first just because, if you fall on your face when you get into the US market, it's hard to get back in and you can't really be successful. So they were slow to get in there, but. The way they got in was Kobe Johnson. Advanced Machinery just saw this hole in what he could offer when it comes to finish shops and how curing was a really big problem. But there's this range of, you can either buy a full line or you can buy a big room that's hard and requires a lot of energy and requires a lot of space. And you just wanted something in the middle. He had a lot of like mid-size, small to mid-size cabinet shops that aren't gonna invest in a full system, but, or maybe even a reciprocator, but they need curing. And so he just called'em and said, Hey, let's figure this out. And they figured it out. We got these moving and we got, I don't know, over a hundred of them now in the US And so it's been about four years since it's been in the US market, but it's not a new technology.

Jacob Edmond

Okay. So yeah, can you tell me a little bit more, you know, so you explain this fits like kind of this middle ground, right? Where you could, some shops, before this would invest in a full line, which meaning it sounds like a full automated finishing line, right? Where you have everything from actually applying the finishes, the sanding, applying the finishes and the curing right into an automated line. And then the other end of the spectrum would be, everything is kind of. Manual. Right. You still have spray boots and then you either are taking time for it to cure or you have an oven or something. Right. And can you talk about, the differences of those extremes and then how this fits in the middle of that?

Ryan Randell

Yeah. So when you see most shops, I would say 80% of them, man, not 80, maybe 70, still are just a booth. Spray guns, racks, they spray it, they rack it, they wait, and they're done. There's a large number of shops in the US that are finishing that way. The rest of them will get into some automation, like they'll get a flat line or they'll get maybe some kind of curing. But not usually. Usually curing is on the back end of that. And so when they're looking at like, Hey, how do I automate? How do I get better? How do I do these things? A really simple place to start that we've found is just, Hey, can you cure your parts faster? Because universally, if you don't have curing, you have a bottleneck. It's just period. It's how it is. It takes a long time for coatings to cure. And so there's just a bottleneck that they run into. And so shops, when they want to get into a full line you really have to have space. Like you have to have space. A lot of them are 70 foot to a hundred foot to, you know, 70 foot wide. It just depends on the volume.'cause you can get into a simple reciprocator flash oven, infrared or hot air oven then done. you can get into a full system that's u-shaped. You have full line control where you can, load a part on the end. It's gonna go around the circle. It's gonna flip automatically. It's gonna spray again, automatic color changes. So you can almost fully automate, but there is a cost and there is a utility requirement and there is a space requirement that shops just. Aren't there? Most woodworking shops aren't giant manufacturing facilities. A lot of them are mom and pop shops. A lot of them are just small seven to 15 man shops that are just trying to figure it out. They don't have that kind of footprint to work with. And so where we come in is we come in like, Hey, we can give you automation. We can create space immediately with this SCHUBOX to give you some throughput. Just right away. It's a very easy implementation. It's not a whole shift in your production, we'll say.'cause when you go to flat line, have to then shift Hey, only flat parts get finished in here, so we'll have some here while some here. We gotta figure out where to marry'em at the end.

Jacob Edmond

Yeah.

Ryan Randell

so there's just more things to figure out. With what we do. The implementation is very direct, very simple.

Jacob Edmond

Because even if shops that do have a flat line, like you mentioned, there are limitations, right?'cause it's only flat parts. So you're either, if you're doing cabinets or even, you know, custom assemblies, it's okay. Can you pre-finish them before assembly and then assemble? But inevitably, every shop still encounters products that can't go through a flat line that need to get the same finish. So that's where you still are doing the spray booth and you still are either waiting, most of'em, waiting for a finish or you're trying to speed it and wrapping things and trying to protect the finish without damaging it to get it to the job site. And that's the bottleneck you described because almost every shop, you're working like you are with non finished goods, right? If you're doing laminate or other stuff that. You can get it fully assembled. You don't have this issue, but then you may be on the same job, have stained cabinets or stained assemblies that have to go through finish and you're sitting there trying to wait for them to cure. And also, depending on where you are in the country or what the weather is, that can wildly vary your curing times and also what products you're able to work with, I would imagine. Right.

Ryan Randell

Yeah. All of those are variables. They're all big things. So shop environment is a big piece of that. Like how dirty is it, right? We get a lot of contamination things. If you're in a small shop and you're sanding here, you're finishing here, but you're only finishing a little bit, and then you have to take that rack and move it to a different spot. So then it's just kind of. Hanging out. So you definitely need a space to keep it safe and cured, but like you were mentioning flat lines do not do everything. We have these right beside fully, enclosed flat lines because there's sometimes people just don't wanna load up a flat line to run six parts. You don't wanna load up a flat line to run, one-off colors. You wanna just do that in your booth, get it done, get it out. Or your rework, right? You're running like all these parts of the flat line, but something got damaged on site. You gotta turn some parts over quickly, you know, or samples. There's all these little ways that when you don't have curing, at least the kind of flexible curing that a room would offer. You just run into a wall. You just gotta wait over and over and it's a big headache and all the shops run like curing is almost always one of their biggest headaches.'cause finishing like what you guys do is very, like when you're talking about drawings and CAT scan, it's very direct. Like I know exactly what this measurement's gonna be. I know what it's gonna look like. I can tell you exactly how long it's gonna take to run through my CNC exactly how long it's gonna run through my Edge vendor. Like those are very known commodities. When you get into finishing like people's I don't know. It's a black art. It depends on my coating, it depends on the humidity, it depends on my catalyst, it depends on my mill thickness. It depends on all these things that sometimes feel like they're outta control of it, you know? It's like, well, whatever happens happens, we just gotta get it finished. And we say like, that's probably one of the most important parts of your process. It's what everyone touches and sees and feels. And, we've seen that it's just a battle for so many shops. Like getting, finishing right is such a battle.

Jacob Edmond

Yeah. There in comes, the SCHUBOX, this product that you've talked about, and it's technology that's been around for a while, but can you give us a little bit more detailed explanation of what is the SCHUBOX? How does it work?

Ryan Randell

Yeah, the SCHUBOX, our primary method of curing is longwave infrared. It's a gas catalytic panel, that uses, for use a scientific word, it's an exothermic chemical reaction. It means we interact gas with a platinum catalyst. And so when you have a hot platinum it'll interact with gas and create that long wave infrared that we need and that heat. And so we mix, whether it's natural gas or propane, or we mix it. And we it across the face of this emitter. We're getting long wave infrared and a little bit of heat. Um, the reason we like long wave infrared is'cause it has a long travel distance, right? You have long wave that's gonna move, it's gonna be able to reflect. That's a big piece of our technology is the ability to reflect our infrared. And it doesn't get as hot. As the others, right? The intensity, the energy intensity comes back a little bit. So when you're working with coatings, you don't wanna shock the coating. You don't wanna like put too much heat too fast. You don't want to get it too hot because you are working with wood substrates or plastic or heat sensitive substrates. And so if you start baking them and cooking them too quickly, or for too long, you're gonna really mess up your substrate, whether it's the wood or NBF or plastic or glass or whatever we're working with. And so we like the long wave infrared because one it's low energy, but two because it reflects, and then three because it can penetrate coatings. And so the way that works is that infrared, because it's just a light wave, right? Infrared is a light wave and it reflects across. All the parts of this room and it penetrates coatings. So when we're penetrating those coatings, we're driving our carrier liquids out. Whether it's a solvent, whether it's a urethane, whether it's a water-based coating. We're getting to the bottom, we're going to the substrate and pulling up. So that kind of flips on its head what traditional curing is. Most of the time it's air dry, right? You pull it out, you air dry, and it's a top down cure, meaning you're gonna form a film and it's just gonna work its way down until it gets to the bottom. Which is. You know, a very, very common way most people do it, and how traditionally shops have done it, even if they're building a room, they're putting warm or hot air in there, but it's still a top down cure. And so as that film dry, it gets thicker, and then the underneath has a harder time. Coming out right, so it slows down dramatically. The first, know, 15, 20, 30 minutes of cure goes really fast, right? You can get almost to tack free relatively quick, but the problem is you have another 12 to 24 hours. For it to be actually cured and actually usable and actually be able to flip the part or package the part or stack it. So you have this huge wait time to get it cured. And that's because there's still solvent or water trapped underneath that film and you gotta just let it finish. And so what we do as we start at the bottom and cure up, and so when that. Substrate or when that coating is dry at the top, below it's dry as well. We can do that with the long wave because of the way that light wave penetrates that coating. And so that gives us, you know, just incredibly short cured times, but also a fully cured time instead of just Hey, it's kind of dry at the touch. I don't know if I can flip it. I don't know if I can package it. I don't know if I can just move it on to assembly or whatever. And so that's what we do. We control the air in the room. Everything's filtered. We move the air around because. That's what you need to cure, right? You need some heat. We like some infrared and we like air movement. Especially for your water-based coatings. Because as that water vapor comes up, we wanna get it off the face of that. And so have our own air control, right? So we have the ability to move our air. We recirculate some of it, we exhaust some of it depending on the coating. Depending on what they're running and how they're running it. So there's a lot of flexibility with it. The other thing, I'm kind of rambling, but I got a lot of stuff on this. Is our ability to put parts anywhere you want since it's not a directional cure. It's a reflected cure. I don't have to put my parts in front of that panel. I can just put parts front to back, left to right, fill the whole room up and they're all gonna cure. And that's a really unique application. It's a unique way to cure. There's really nobody that cures that way. And it's something that we get to do just'cause of the way we use long wave, the reflective stainless steel and air movement.

Jacob Edmond

Yeah, so this is a self-contained. Product, right? This is a, comparable to what people might envision with either an oven or a paint booth, right? That you can stand this up in a space and that is very largely different to other comparable ovens, I would think, as far as what you need space-wise as well as utility hookup, I think right.

Ryan Randell

Yep. Yeah, it is 100% standalone. We have our own service crew. We have our own parts department. We control the whole process front to back, and so our guys come in, is a standalone unit. We put it wherever you want to. And it's fully customizable. We have some that are L-shaped, go around corners. We have some that are tall, some that are wider, some that go through walls because hey, I want part of it in my finish room. I want the other part of it in my assembly area or when I'm done, I can just take it outta my room just to save space. And so it is unique'cause we can make it however we want to. And it also, it does stand alone and our utilities are hooked up to it. We use natural gas with propane and some power. Um, but the primary driver is gas catalytic is where we get our infrared from. The power is to keep the fan moving and control cabinet

Jacob Edmond

And what about exhaust or things like that?

Ryan Randell

No, we do not have to exhaust it. Some choose to. It depends on the local code of what they want. But one of the reasons we don't have to actually punch a hole in your shop is because it's not technically an oven. It does not get the right amount of temperature. It doesn't get hot enough. We don't use enough gas. Our infrared is completely flame free. There's zero combustion whatsoever, is 100% chemical reaction. So there's zero opportunity, for a flame, and there's zero opportunity for, any other kind of byproducts with combustion ovens, when you have combustion, you get byproducts, you get, harmful vapors that happen when combustion happens. That's why we have, catalytic converters on your car. That's why we have exhausts on these propane burners is because there's harmful chemicals that are a result of that process because we use straight chemical reaction, we don't have any harmful byproducts. So all we're doing really is capturing what's already in your shop, offgassing. And if it's a solvent, we're actually mitigating VOCs. If it's a water, we're creating a humid free space and getting the water vapor out. And I wanna touch on that a little bit is because the way that VOCs work, when you are using a conversion or a solvent-based paint, that's actually harmful offgassing, it's called a VOC, a volatile organic compound. And not great for you, right? And most places charge you per ton of however many VOCs you are admitting or. Shooting out of your shop, like when you're spraying or things like that. What we can do, because it's just a chemical reaction and we can use gas for it, we actually can take the vapor that's coming off your parts and as we recirculate it, we bring it back across the face of that gas emitter and we oxidize. So we change the chemical nature of that gas to carbon dioxide and a little bit of water vapor. So we actually mitigate VOCs in the shop. It becomes, the smell drops considerably in the actual amount of VOC in your shop changes. And so that's why we don't have to exhaust it.'cause if you're just air drying your parts anyway, all sitting in your shop. All we're doing is taking what's in your shop and we're mitigating the VOC or we're just controlling the air.

Jacob Edmond

So what type of maintenance does one of these have? Like are you having to change out platinums or anything like that?

Ryan Randell

So platinum is what they call a noble metal, which means it doesn't degrade with use. So when you heat it up and we use it as a catalyst, it doesn't wear out like there isn't a life on it that then wears out will. What will kill it is dust. When there's a lot of dust in that room, what'll happen is it'll start to accumulate on the face of that emitter and just burn itself to the fiber in there. And then reactions still happening, but there's a wall of dust and so you don't get your actual long wave ir out of the face of that emitter, so. the maintenances keep dust off the walls, and so you can see it when there's dust on the walls. You can kind of see as it's accumulating. It's time to clean our room. And so it's just simple as brushing the walls down, vacuuming it up off the floor. Those emitters are just gonna use a brush, soft brush and knock the dust off of it, um, and go from there. We do have a filter, so we control all the air coming in, but. This is taking care of those emitters.'cause that's the life of that machine. It's that emitter curing your parts.

Jacob Edmond

So for most shops, are you seeing, you know, that they're, this takes like one of your typical clients that has a paint booth, has spray booth, they're using maybe different, catalyst depending on the year, different, formulations. But depending on the weather and the time of year.

Ryan Randell

sure.

Jacob Edmond

But largely they're air drying, right? Or they're just waiting. And so this speeds up right away, that cure time, but how else does it change their workflows usually?

Ryan Randell

Well, finishing becomes predictable, right? One of the things that you'll see in shops without automated curing or without any kind of curing at all, is actual throughput is unpredictable. We get it to the shop, it gets into finishing and. just gets stuck for a while. There's no real Hey, I know it'll take this long this group of days to get it out. It's Hey, it's gonna be in finishing for a while. Depends on how quick stuff gets cured. Depends on how, quickly we can process stuff. And so of the things it does is it really opens up scheduling. It lets you actually understand and know and cost correctly, how much time, labor and energy are being put into your finishing. As opposed to air dry when you're waiting for those parts to dry, you're just guessing, honestly. You're guessing, or you make your dry time so big that you can't screw it up. Because if you go too quick, you flip parts too quick or you try to stay in too quick, you just screw up your part. And then you gotta redo the whole thing. You gotta strip it back down and do it again. That's a huge cost and a huge time burden. So it makes it predictable. Obviously, the reduction, when you're talking about a conversion bar and a shrink time, from eight hours, 12 hours, 24 hours to cure, right? And so most shops, what I see is when they don't have curing, gonna do their primers because primers cure, quick sealers, cure, quick, their high solids, and they cure quickly. But you get to your top coats where the time just takes forever. These three, four days sometimes to get through a job to get it sprayed and sanded and cured out the door. And so what we can do is we take what would take, eight hours on the low end to be ready to flip or ready to be packaged. Most shops wait overnight just because it's safer. They don't wanna screw that part up because it'll waste so much time and money. We can take it down to like 30 minutes. 40 minutes of cure time, and then it's done and you can move it on. But it's also repeatable and predictable. It's not subject to the weather, it's not subject to the shop, it's not subject to the coating. Like we know we can get the coating cured this quickly, every single time. So it helps them batch their production better. It keeps less work in progress. We see a lot of work in progress prior to this too, because it's like, well, I have to wait, till tomorrow before I can touch this again. I gotta start working on something else. So you bring something else in, then you bring something else in. You got all these jobs are in process, in your finish shop. all of which have the, the possibility of getting beat up or damaged.'cause the longer you stay in there, and accessible to everybody. The longer, stuff happens in shops, carts get hit, people hit things, and stuff gets dropped, and so it just, it lets them shrink their work in progress and also get jobs through much more efficiently.

Jacob Edmond

So you, does it change the cure time depending on how many parts you put in the SCHUBOX at a time? Like how is it, you know, and are you able to measure something like okay. Or is it just opening up and seeing did the time work and it's fully cured?

Ryan Randell

Yeah. So the way we do it is when we install it, we stay there with you for a little bit and actually prove out your times. We've done enough now where we know. Where to start with these. This isn't a batch oven, so you don't put it in instead of timer and wait and pull it out. You're gonna be putting some parts in, like you'll be putting some primer in here. And then the next piece of that is you put some top coat in beside it, or this rack goes in, working on another rack. Okay, that's done. I'm putting that in. The one I just put in, it's probably done. So I'm putting that in, taking the next one out, moving it onto the next process, bringing the next one in. You're fully walking in and out and using this. The whole time. So what we do is we time carts, right? There's a bunch of different ways people time these carts, but you basically are timing per cart, not per batch that goes in the oven because we're able to be flexible with what goes in when and how.'cause it's, again, we're running at a low temperature. We're not, it's not an oven. It's an industrial heater and we run it about, depending on where you are, 95 to 1 0 5 temperature wise. And so. I mean, that's, I gets that hot in a lot of shops in the summer, right? So it's not a dangerous heat, and it's not a, it's not a harmful space to be in. So you just walk in and out of it. You bring parts in, bring parts out as needed, and you time it per cart.

Jacob Edmond

But then once you know the time for, this specific finish and these specific material I'm working on today, every cart you can time the same.

Ryan Randell

A hundred percent. Yeah. We know primers will take this long. We know, you know, seal coats take this long. We know clear top coats take this long. We know our white pigmented take this long. We know our dark.'cause all of those factor into how long it takes. They're gonna be within a window. But you know, your primers are gonna take 15, 10, 15 minutes maybe. And your top coats are gonna take that 30, 35, just depends on what you're doing with it. But yeah, on that rack or on that cart will be cured that the same rate consistently. It doesn't matter how full it is. Everything's gonna cure. And a lot of times we don't even see'em get that full because by the time we get the work to it, the work that's in it's coming out. And so it's not like we're just stacking a ton of stuff in there because by the time the next piece is ready,'cause we have doors on both sides, you're pulling something else out. So you're always kind of just, you have this circle that's working with these parts.

Jacob Edmond

And is it, so what about is it possible to over cure something?

Ryan Randell

Yeah, it is possible to over cure something. In our system. Not really because, we don't use a ton of heat. When stuff gets over cured, it's when it's interacted too much with too much heat and it becomes brittle. The paint becomes brittle because it's baked and your surface temperature gets too high. And so in ours, our surface temperature just stays low. Like we're never gonna get up above, you know, the most, we've seen some of'em run like at one 10. One 15. And even that is kind of below the spectrum of hurting your coatings and this infrared, once it's done penetrating that coating, we can't continue to penetrate it. There's nothing to go in, so it just starts reflecting off the surface. And so the only way to overcook it is if you get it too high in temperature. So we have parts that stay in there. If people forget about'em 3, 4, 5 hours, it doesn't matter. It's not gonna overcook'em or over cure'em or hurt the substrate. That's really the bigger thing is in these ovens for too long, when too high heat, you start getting glue joint problems. You start getting some delamination on your veneers, your edge banding can also deaminate. And that's where you get into real problems.'cause when you're baking in a batch, you cycle that temperature up and then you wait and then you have to get rid of it because if you don't like, you're gonna harm your parts, they're gonna get too hot. With this, you don't have that problem. We don't wanna cook them with temperature. We want the IR to cure them. Temperature gonna help, the air movements gonna help, but we're not trying to bake it.

Jacob Edmond

So are there any assumptions or like learning curves people have to go through that are coming from a more traditional use oven? Right? There are things people are like that you have to kind of retrain them, Hey, this works differently. Or you know what you, used to be true is no longer true.

Ryan Randell

Yeah. A lot of it is the big, the biggest thing is getting them to get the parts organized in a way that they shrink their work in progress. The actual implementation install is very simple to use and so there's not really an operation learning curve for it. It's about getting your parts in there. And honestly, we've seen very few problems with implementing it into shops once it's turned on, they're moving their parts into a space already to cure. Now, instead of just leaving it here, you actually just roll it into the SCHUBOX and get it cured and then bring it out. So much less on their shop floor. While we take up some space with that oven, or with the curing room. The amount of actual racks and parts that they have sitting around just waiting to cure dramatically reduces. So you actually take back square footage for other things because you don't have all these parts just hanging out. Now you're actually getting'em through your shop and getting'em to the dock door where they can get out and to the customer as opposed to having one job sitting here and one job sitting there. All at different stages of finish because you're just waiting. And so this lets you get it all, much more contained. And traditional ovens, again they take longer. You're gonna have a longer flash time before you can just bake'em. And there's a lot of different types of those. But the most common one is probably a convectional hot air oven. We see those where it's just a room and they pump in hot air. Hey, here's hot air. see if it can cure. And what happens is just, it helps. But when they bring it out, they still have to let it shrink because they're really only getting it to where dry to the touch, not to a cure. And so we're getting to an actual cure, not just dry to the touch. And so you have less time outside the oven just waiting for it to finish and then get out the door.

Jacob Edmond

Also with the traditional oven you mentioned a flash time, like typically, are they loading it up, turning it on? Letting it, you know, run and then letting it cool down and pulling parts out. Like I imagine there's other logistics involved.

Ryan Randell

Yeah, it ver it varies. So if you're using like a batch oven we'll say like an infrared, like a what do they call'em? Like a prime heat type where it's a batch. You bring it in and it has, you don't know, sixty, seventy, a hundred twenty, whatever IR lights that go through a process, right? They slowly warm, they get hotter, and then you eventually get it to the place where you're putting full power on it and it cycles through a batch. That's one way. They do it, but you definitely have to have some flash time before that. Another way is like those convection they don't turn those off and on. The other one's just electric ir, so it turns on and off. The other ones you want, the room has to stay hot. Because it's so hard to warm, to heat a room with just air. And so they just keep it on and keep the room hot and try to just keep it hot. And so you definitely have to flash before you put it in the air. Ours you have to flash too. It's not unique in that point. You don't wanna put soaking wet paint in front of the emitter you're gonna run into problems, that's universal across the board. Most coatings need a little bit of time just to relax, just to lay down bit before you start forth curing them. The backend of that is like if you're in a batch oven and like you do one batch at a time, you gotta fill that cart up and then you wait. You just kind of keep stuff in queue. With this, like as soon as that cart's ready and flash, you're just putting it in. And you're putting multiple things in left to right, front to back, you're filling it up and then you don't have to wait for the batch to be done. Hey, my primer's already done. Let's get it outta here. And there's no separate recipes for it. You just put it all in there.

Jacob Edmond

Awesome. So who is the SCHUBOX not for? Because I imagine you get a lot of people that come to you, right? Are you ever having to steer people away that are thinking it's something it's not.

Ryan Randell

The biggest thing that it's not, it will not cure powder coating. So when you're in the metal world there's a lot of powder coating and powder is different because it has to get to a very high temperature. Like four or 500 degrees for a certain amount of time to actually cure and be done. This is not for that. We don't cure powder coating. We don't build these to cure powder coating. We can build'em to what's called gel cure like. Or Final Cure. Basically hit it with a ton of IR energy at the end, or before it bakes and so it helps speed up that process. But we do not cure powder coating in this type of system. That's a completely different thing. Just because of the amount of heat you have to have and control a different animal. Basically any liquid coating. Like there are metal coatings that are not powder coat. If it has a carrier liquid, whether it's a metal glass, PVC you know, wood clearly. You know, we cure styrofoam, we cure all kinds of substrates. It's really about the coating. So we haven't run into a lot of situations where it's like, eh. This isn't for that. This is, you need a different type of oven for this. The vast majority of places we're in, like they just spray in wet paint. They're not powder coating it. And so if they do, we'll send'em somewhere else. We don't really do powder coating.

Jacob Edmond

Awesome. Yeah. So what are you seeing coming in the future? Obviously you guys are, you're rolling this out. This is, you know, still relatively new technology for the US, but what else do you see coming down the pipes for finishing technology?

Ryan Randell

One of the things like for finishing technology, what I see a lot of and I know everyone says this, but like robotics is gonna be a big piece of that moving forward. It has become hard for these shops to find good finishers. I don't wanna call it a dying trade, but it is getting more and more hard to find somebody who's really good at this hand spray wise. Because the training time, the lead time on it is extensive. It just takes a long time to be a really good sprayer. There's an art form to it and, a lot of these, a lot of these shops. Trying to find guys to do it, or girls to do it, or somebody to do it. But it's tough, right? Like not a lot of people love standing in a booth, covered in a mask, over, spray all over'em while they're finishing apart. It's like, it's hard to find people to get into that trade. It's a very good paying trade and if you're really good at it, you'll make great money. But it's hard as, the trades, it's hard to get the next generation into it. And so what some companies are doing is like, for some of the stuff we just have to automate, we have to get some robotics, we have to do everything flat and get the curing done. So we don't have a skilled laborer, we have an operator. It's really what I see in a lot of shots that they're trying to get to is more we need to operate or not a high cost finishing person. Right? Because it's a hard job and you're beholden to them because like if they do a good job, it's very important that it looks great. It's just is in this industry. If your finishing is terrible, like you're not gonna get a lot more business. And so I see a lot of people moving towards that or at least exploring it, whether they're actually doing it or not. Kind of varies. They're still patching and there's still some good finishers, but. Like you go into these shops and you look at the finishers, a lot of them are on the older side, they're gonna start aging out, they're gonna start retiring, and there's not a ton of people that wanna jump in there and start spraying in a booth.

Jacob Edmond

Yep.

Ryan Randell

so I see automation in that form. They want operators as opposed to, high skill, high paid positions.

Jacob Edmond

Yeah. Even in sanding technology, we're seeing it as well, not just the spraying, right.

Ryan Randell

Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I would say the sanding parts even worse than the spraying part. Sanding hand sanding these parts is, it's a hard job.

Jacob Edmond

Yeah.

Ryan Randell

It's a very hard job. It's very important. That's what's crazy is these two, and finishing is just such an important part of your process. Like it doesn't matter if that's the world's best door if you spray garbage on top of it.

Jacob Edmond

Yeah.

Ryan Randell

garbage. It doesn't matter.

Jacob Edmond

Yep. Awesome. Well, what advice do you have for shop owners or finishing departments out there?

Ryan Randell

one of the things that I would recommend is try to get an actual hold on what it's costing you. So many times when I have this conversation, it's like, what is your labor in this? What is the cost in this? How much is this cure time? How much is this lag before it gets in there? What is it costing you when all your finishing, all your production just kind of gets choked in this one point? And they don't know. It's like, I don't know. That's just part of the business, and you can see very directly on the other parts of the process, like how fast does this go quick and how much labor, like it's easier to quantify those things. But finishing has become, or is in my opinion in my experience, very hard to quantify what it's actually costing you time-wise, labor-wise, material wise. And so being able to get in there with them and Hey let's actually understand. What this costs, right? Let's understand your production and understand how it goes through. And some shops do great, but most of them that I'm in, especially on the smaller to midsize, where the owner is so involved in everything anyway, he's running a million different ways trying to get parts out. He's installing, he's helping, on assembly. He's like, and they're small shops and so it's hard to quantify that. And so much, I think so much money and so much time is left on the table in finishing because. It's just hard to understand, right? And so there's a lot, a lot that can be learned if you just take a little bit of time to understand your finishing and really what it's costing to get parts in and out. So yeah, spend some time. Understanding your finishing process. That's, it's a big part of what we do anyway. Like we're consultants at that end. We talk about curing and we sell curing stuff, I've been around finishing for so long that a lot of it's just Hey, did you know you can do these things? Did you know about organizing it this way? Did you know you can change these things? And so a big piece of what we bring to the table as well. Hey, let's understand this better and let's fix this flow like you're walking on top of yourself multiple times just to get these parts here and there. Let's just flip a couple spaces and make this easier,

Jacob Edmond

yeah. Awesome. For people that are interested in finding out more about SCHUBOX or Elevated Finishes or contacting you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Ryan Randell

Yeah, so I mean our website, elevated finishing.com. We have a YouTube page elevated finishing on Facebook, Instagram, all those. It's just Elevated finishing. Look'em up. We have videos. We have some explanations, we show a lot of our installs. We have testimonials, case studies, all things that you can see and understand that. The companies have taken control of that bottleneck. It's Hey, this is what they have seen now that they've addressed this and they've invested in actually helping finishing, this is the feedback. Like we just one where, immediately it doubled their capacity. Like overnight it doubled their capacity. That's what we get, like the problem. Then after that it's let's backfill. We need more jobs. Or there's almost if you have a large job and you implement this, it almost pays for itself just in that job because the weeks it takes off of the lead time of getting stuff out. So yeah, elevatedfinishing.com and all the associated Elevated Finishing socials is where you can find'em all.

Jacob Edmond

Awesome. Well, if you're listening, we'll have those linked in the show notes. You can go down and jump right to those links. Ryan, thank you again for coming on and sharing about Elevated Finishing and SCHUBOX and all the great knowledge you've shared with us. And look forward to having you gone again in the future.

Ryan Randell

Absolutely Jacob. We'll see you again soon, man.

Contributor

Jacob Edmond

Host