Gateway Paint & Body Shop

By Gary Baker

The manager of a Greeneville, Tenn., collision repair shop says innovative technology has brought, at least in one sense, a blessing and a curse to the collision repair industry. Bryan Myers, manager of Gateway Paint and Body Shop, located at 3301 East Andrew Johnson Highway, says the recent addition of aluminum bodies to the Ford truck line “probably will be what we will be seeing more and more of, because of the approximately 800-pound weight difference from the steel-bodied trucks.

Myers said it is much more than just the aluminum bodies, of course. He points to the fact that many of the higher-end trucks and some of the cars have technological innovations that keep them and their drivers from having wrecks.

“We don’t see all that many of these trucks here in the shop for repair, because the technology has improved so much that they just don’t seem to get involved in very many serious impact collisions,” he said.

“Some of the high-end F-150s and probably the new SuperDuty F-250s now have 360-degree cameras on board as part of their accident-avoidance systems, and they are even putting a trailer-backing feature on them I understand,” he said. “They have a knob on the dashboard, and you never have to touch the steering wheel. It’s like the parallel parking system that is already on many of these new vehicles, except it allows you to back a trailer into a spot. It’s incredible.”

gatwaymandesk_WEBMyers is, however, circumspect about the heavy reliance on this type of technology, impressive though it may be. Especially when it comes to young, inexperienced drivers.

“I guess I’m ‘old school,’ he said. “I still think you should have to demonstrate that you can change a flat tire before being issued a drivers’ license. We are disabling them [young people] from learning basic skills, skills they might need out in the real world.”

But the aluminum Ford truck body is basically a win/win idea, he said, with the caveat that changes in repair technique cause shops like his to adjust to a new collision repair “landscape.”

“The aluminum is much lighter, and just as strong, as best we can tell, but it has to be handled differently,” Myers pointed out. “Aluminum isn’t new to vehicles, but the technology to repair it has changed.  I actually remember working on a 1972 Porsche that had an aluminum hood, but that was a long time ago.”

Today’s paint and body shop, according to Myers, has to incorporate new welders to accommodate the aluminum bodies, but even more importantly, the work has to be done in a separate room from traditional steel repairs.

“Cross-contamination is the risk with the aluminum bodies,” he explained. “If steel particles, which of course are present in the air when steel bodies are being welded, find their way to the aluminum bodies as they are being repaired, then galvanic corrosion can take place if the steel gets embedded in the aluminum. That can also give the aluminum a ‘powdery’ finish, which is not what we are going for, of course.”

Myers said Gateway Paint & Body has already devoted about 1,000 square feet of the shop’s overall 10,000 square feet to a discrete work space for the aluminum bodies, and as more vehicles are made wholly or in part of aluminum, the shop will assign even more space to keep the aluminum repairs free from cross-contamination.

Concerning the technology associated with the new aluminum bodies, Myers said I-CAR has done all the training for the new Ford F-150s.

“Ford trusted them with it and let them do all the training, so we use them,” he said. “If the manufacturer considers them to be the ‘Gold Standard’ in training, then we do too.”

Myers said his shop has had a “birds-eye” view of the Ford technology because it is owned by Lenny Lawson, who has owned the local Ford dealership under the Lawson banner for four decades in Greene County.

“We changed the name of the collision repair shop only about three months ago from Lawson Collision to Gateway for a couple of reasons,” he said. “For one thing, the dealership itself is on the other side of town. Also, we have several different businesses adjacent to us that are under the Lawson umbrella, and we believed it would be easier for customers to keep track of what we offer if we named them Gateway.”

Those businesses, which Myers and his management staff also oversee, include a large accessories shop, a used-car reconditioning center, and a mechanical repair facility, all immediately adjacent to the collision repair shop. He said he has two full-time mechanics who are kept busy maintaining and rehabilitating cars that come in to the used-car facility, as well as making any mechanical repairs needed on cars in the collision repair shop.

“We have come to believe it is important to offer our customers a one-stop service here, where they can get almost anything they need right here,” he said. “In fact, the accessories business has really blossomed in recent years. We do a lot of spray-on bed liner work, and not just on pickup beds. We have devoted a large booth to that work and have sprayed a surprising array of things in there, some of them non-automotive related, like the bow of a boat hull. That’s how tough our bed liner spray is, to be able to at least partially withstand the scraping a boat hull undergoes when it comes ashore on a rocky beach. And we’ve used this product, Tuff it’s called, on the inside of horse trailers, tool boxes, just about anything that needs a tough coating. People have started bringing their Jeeps in here and telling us to remove the carpeting and spray Tuff on the inside of the vehicle, given how easy it is to spray out after they go off-roading I guess.”

While diversification has become an integral part of Myers’ and owner Lawson’s business strategy, he said on-going training and customer satisfaction are the real cornerstones of their business plan.

“The aluminum bodies are the biggest change to come along in recent years, but they are not the only thing we have to stay abreast of,” he said. “Technology definitely does not stand still, and we have to be ready to deal with the latest techniques.”

Toward that end, Myers said his shop has the very latest color-matching camera offered by Axalta, formerly Dupont, and he is training his paint technicians to use it and a wide array of water-based paints to “virtually wipe out color-matching issues.”

“And we can now use a [computer] tablet to write estimates on location, anywhere that has wi-fi,” he said. “In fact, we can use it anywhere if we piggy-back it off a smart phone. I thought we would be using that feature more than we have, but it is still nice to have it as a record of the estimate. It helps us eliminate mistakes and makes the process go a little faster.”

Myers also said that training is crucial going forward.

“We simply have to get our technicians educated, and keep them educated,” he said. “Even though I’ve only been here three years, I’ve replaced every one of our technicians in that time. I heard some advice years ago, and I’ve taken it to heart: ‘Hire slow and fire quick.’

“The first thing I look at when we go to hire a new paint or body man is, ‘Do they fit in with our environment?’” Myers said. “They need to be self-motivated for one thing. And they have to be comfortable working in a ‘family environment,’ meaning can they get along with everyone here without taking criticism personally, sort of like when a father or an older brother gives his son or sibling advice learned by experience.”

Myers said he is happy with his current crew, but it wasn’t easy to get to that point.

“Some of the young guys just out of vo-tech school seem to want to get trained just enough to work on their own cars, although we do have one young fellow here who showed up with a lot of raw talent, and we’ve brought him along, and he promises to ‘go the distance.’

“We insist that a new hire have a good work ethic, which isn’t necessarily obvious up front, and be clean and drug-free,” he added. “We do a criminal background check, a drug screen, and even a driving record check before we make a decision on a new hire.”

But beyond training, technology, and education, Myers said that customer satisfaction has to be the constant goal, one that he and his crew never take their eyes off of.

“Mr. Lawson’s businesses haven’t survived and prospered for 40 years without paying a lot of attention to what his customers need to stay happy. Naturally, our first and most important goal is to put a car back to an optimum safety level, then strive for cosmetic perfection,” he said. “We want to be the best-equipped facility, with the best-trained technicians available, and let our customers drive away from here knowing they made the best possible choice of who to repair their vehicle. That is what will bring them and people they refer to us back again and again.”  •

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