The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Paint and Body Shop U-Spray, Opportunity for a National Franchise?

Tim Sheridan from WI mentioned stopping by U-Spray in a thread over on the VCCA site and I was asking if it was a place where you can go in and use their sandblast equipment or spraying booth.
And, if that was the case I sure wish we had one down here in Illinois, we don’t, do we????

Trying to blast anything out in the back yard on a 95° day with the hood on is one miserable experience and I’m only good for about five minutes before the heat gets the best of me. Even with a $150 hood with an air feed to the hood, the glass gets so fogged up that it feels like there’s a rain storm under there.

The last couple of jobs I worked at we had several large sandblast booths, one was even a double that could handle whole rear-end housing or a front axle. I've spent many an hour in the gloves while I was eating my lunch. Wish I could afford a good cabinet for home now. I've got the pressures pot and a siphon bucket and a toy HF bench top cabinet that leaks so bad that it’s unusable and clogs the shop-vac every couple of minutes, in other words all that stuff is VERY much made for the amateur and they are nothing but trouble, headache and mess. Love to have a nice big 48" blast cabinet with a good filter and it wouldn’t hurt the operation to have a good big $1500 air compressor with a couple hundred bucks worth of air dryers on.

When it comes to U-Spray it and painting, my “big ol’ wife” wife has finally put the kybosh on anymore of that outside the garage since the whole corner of the concrete apron in the front of the house is now DP90 black. Besides that I’ve got the “neighbors from hell,“ on each side of me that sue anybody and everybody at the drop of a hat or least speck of paint in the air. That’s the way they supplement their SS and retirement.
So this “U-Spray” sounds like something that should be a national franchise, bet it would go over big almost anywhere it was started.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

But $75 per hour? I spent about 30 hours blasting my frame and all of my chassis components and spent $80 on air compressor rental, ~ $100 on a HF pressure blaster, and about $40 of abrasive, for a total of $220. If I did it at U - spray it would have cost $2250. I wouldn't pay $75/hour even if they did all the blasting.

I gave the blasting a try with tools I got from my son in law and like Denny said it is way to much to clean up and being under that hood is not fun at all , so I took my frame to the blaster this thrusday and there going to do it for 250.00 thats the rims and all , I also wish there was someplace we could do it , paint and blast with the stuff those guys use it would only take mabe an hour or two to blast a frame so You can see the saving and You could do it Yourself and get a better job ,just think how nice it would be to be able to take your fenders in or a box of parts in and blast them and NO mess to clean up . also I can paint myself but nowhere to do it. So I got a 30 inch blasting cab. and I do all my small parts and wire brush and clean the other parts ,time I got .


Pete

Over the past 40 years or so I can remember at least 10 attempts at operating a customer-labor shop of one type or another in my area, Nashville, Tennessee. They all failed, ultimately, because it was impossible to meet expenses at a rate of reimbursement that customers were willing to pay. Most of these were hobby shop opeations where the customer rented a bay at a set rate per hour, and the shop provided anything beyond basic hand tools- - - -a lift, engine hoist, jacks and stands, and specialty tools. The overhead cost was astronomical, and insurance cost for a facility like that was unreal. Add the extra potential liability of customers using sandblasters, paint spraying, etc., with all the EPA and OSHA regulations to deal with, and I wouldn't attempt to provide that sort of service at $100.00 per hour! From the perspective of a former body shop owner, I see nothing but nightmares!
Jerry

Denny,

If you have any tombstone companies in your area check with them to see if they'll sandblast parts for you. The two closest to my house both will do this work, and for reasonable prices.

Didn’t hear a price mentioned King. That would be kind of stiff if you were doing the work your self. $75 and hour is what our village sandblaster gets for his work. A friend had his frame and the body of his ’48 Willies panel truck done by him and each of them ran a little over $200, which means that he only had about three hours work in on them. Very nice job I might add, no warpage on the panel. And if you spent 30 hours under the hood your 300 times the man I am in this weather.

Yeah, ya got a point Jerry, I guess I’m still liven in the past when things were a lot simpler, probably would be impossible to do today. In my four years in the Air Force we always had an auto shop where we could do just that, rent a stall and use the shop tools to fix our cars, I did work of all sorts at those from changing engines to some paint work also. I always thought they would have gone over big on the outside also but like you say, with EPA, the lawyers and the do-gooders involved it’s impossible.

Hi Woody, I’ve checked with our stone setter here in town and he said he could do some small stuff when he’s set up to cut a stone. But, that’s why I went out a bought all that portable sandblast junk, so I wouldn’t have to wait on somebody, now I’m waiting for cooler weather, guess I just can’t win.

Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

Yeah, i was doing the sandblast thing in my backyard,i did as much as i could during winter( in florida about 75 degrees) but it's still no fun. my neighbor in the back came over complaining about the dust cloud one windy day, so i took some large plastic sheets and hung it around the edge of the carport and sealed the corners with those big springy clamps. if i could afford it. i would pay someone to do it.i have dug enough sand out of my ears...but i was fortunate to have this setup as far as the cost.

I'm kind of caught in the same place Mark, I got a bunch invested so I might as well bite the bullet and do what I can with what I got.
DG

Uspray has worked great for me and there becomes an "art" of sort learning that the timer is only running when the sandblast cabinet door is closed. I have done a lot of small parts over there and it makes sence for me being that I could not do this type of work at home even if I had the equipment. The mess, noise and neighbors just would not work where I live. Even if I invested in a larger air compressor and a small cabinet I would guess that I could not match the level of equipment they have there. Good equipment = good results quickly and that I what I have experienced with theiir "do it yourself" cabinets.

I have often wondered about many of the legal issues, insurance, etc they are probably faced with, but to be honest, it seems they run this business like it is 1970 (or earlier) so I don't get the impression they worry too much about those things. No liability release forms, old building with probably little to no overhead (cold in the winter and hot in the summer).

I think that if you were to francise that type of thing it would put itself out of business. I'm just glad that they are there for now. It has helped me along the way.


I have heard that some auto clubs have been creeping up across the country that offer full scale shops for members to work on projects. These are over the top in what they offer as well as what it cost to be a "member". I'm talking Country Club prices and beyond which puts it out of the range of pretty much everybody. My guess is it is due to the legal and liability issues associated with it.