Sound techniques and innovative tools can help your shop meet the challenge of today's vehicle contours and designs.
If bodyshop tasks were to be ranked in terms of prestige, painting would probably be at the top of the list. The paint job is what the customer notices first when he or she takes delivery of the vehicle. If the match is good and the finish is glossy, you usually have a satisfied customer. Body work would be a close second. If the metal or plastic hasn’t been restored to its original shape, a quality repair is impossible.
Somewhere down the list, possibly right behind detailing and just ahead of cleanup, is masking. There’s little glamour in applying paper and tape to a vehicle to protect it from overspray and prevent hard repair edges, but a bad masking job can sabotage the repair or, at a minimum, adversely affect quality. Just ask Mike Odum.
Odum is technical director for Maaco Collision Repair and Auto Painting, the nationwide network of 500 franchise operators. Founded in 1972, the Maaco chain paints and repairs more vehicles each year than anyone else in North America. The chain was built on providing paint jobs, most of them complete paint jobs, at low prices. Recently, however, Maaco has put an increased emphasis on quality, going so far as to insert “collision repair” into its corporate name. The goal, says Odum, was to achieve “collision shop or better quality.” As technical director, he led much of the work during a two-year period that went into developing new standard operating procedures (SOPs). In doing so, Maaco may have produced an object lesson for the rest of the industry on the importance of masking.
In an effort to raise standards, Odum says, “We started in the spray booth and worked our way back through the repair process, making changes where we thought they were needed. But masking had the most significant number of changes.”
Four Key Products
Maaco focused on four products not previously part of its SOPs, although many quality shops are familiar with them. Those products are: fine line tape, door aperture foam tape, lifting tape and polycoated paper. Each contributes to a better paint job.
Maaco SOPs now call for maskers to use quarter-inch fine line tape to outline the area being masked, a windshield, for instance, then apply masking paper (usually 18x36-in.) with 3⁄4-in. tape already attached to it. “The fine line is more flexible because there’s no paper attached and it makes it easier to make the bends and curves you need to. Then the technician applies the big sheet of paper with the tape attached to cover most of the area that’s being protected,” Odum explains.
The door aperture foam tape has proved to be invaluable in engine compartments. “It not only keeps paint out, but it keeps dirt in the engine,” he says. He emphasizes that each opening on the vehicle has to be analyzed carefully to determine exactly where and how to apply the foam tape. The goal is to avoid any hard paint edges.
Lifting tape proved the most difficult to adapt to, he says. Lifting tape, often with a plastic edge, is used around moldings to drive the molding up so that paint can get under the molding. Some of the newer imported vehicles, with their tiny rubber moldings, are particularly challenging. “In fact,” says Odum, “we’ve found that women with long fingernails make the best maskers” when it comes to applying lifting tape.
Finally, Maaco has upgraded its masking paper to a polycoated grade. The paper must exhibit strong resistance to solvent soak-through (at least 30 minutes in a cup formed by the paper), and good tear strength. “Generally, we’ve found the blue polycoated paper is among the best,” Odum says. “White and gold are often not top quality.”
Jim Pundt, regional manager for Keystone Automotive, a national distributor of refinish products, echoes those thoughts. “It’s important not to go cheap on masking paper, especially when you’re working with urethane solvents, which are in many of today’s basecoats. You need a urethane-grade paper or the basecoat will bleed through. Don’t go for the $16-a-roll product.”
Quality masking paper also minimizes dust particles and other contaminants, according to Tim Hines, senior market manager, NAPA Tools and Equipment/Paint and Body. “‘Fuzzies,’ or paper/dust particles, when dislodged from the masking paper during the painting process, can easily contaminate a newly painted surface,” Hines explains. “That means additional buffing and detail time to remove those particles from the clear coat.”
(One way some shops economize on masking paper is to use high-quality paper next to the repair and a lower-priced product for the rest of the vehicle.)
Paper, Plastic and More
Masking products, of course, are no longer strictly paper. Plastic sheeting has made the masking step easier. This treated plastic prevents solvent bleed-through and ensures against paint flaking during the demasking process. It comes in several sizes of prefolded drape plastic film rolls, and it can be unrolled from a convenient, hand-held masking dispenser. “Plastic sheeting allows you to mask right up to the critical paint edge and eliminate the need for the 12-in. or 18-in. masking paper border,” says Hines. “Not only is the cost of the masking paper eliminated, but more importantly the labor time is reduced significantly because an entire step is eliminated.”
Liquid spray mask is another product that many shops are discovering. After18-in. paper is applied next to the repair area, the liquid mask is sprayed on the rest of the vehicle with conventional spray equipment. It easily covers hard-to-reach areas, protecting them from overspray, and it washes off after the paint has dried. One gallon covers approximately five cars.
John Poole, regional manager for Mattos, Inc., a refinish jobber with stores in Maryland and Virginia, points out two other advantages of this product: “It holds down dirt, so you don’t have contamination from the rest of the car getting on the repair area. And it eliminates the trash involved in using paper or plastic wrap.”
Some shops also spray liquid mask on booth walls to prevent buildup of overspray. Each application lasts about three months, after which it can be washed off with a hose. Two gallons covers a typical spray booth.
Poole also likes a new edging tool that helps eliminate the dreaded hard edge—a ridge of paint that creates an appearance problem that requires sanding and can also allow moisture to get under the paint film. “You simply feed any 3⁄4-in. masking tape into this dispenser and it automatically folds under one edge of the tape as you pull it out,” he says. “You can follow the curves on hoods, trunk, door jambs and body crease lines and turn corners easily.”
Do’s and Don’ts
Most experts agree that one of the more common mistakes in masking is using excessive amounts of tape instead of paper. That’s because slapping down 1 1⁄2-in. or 2-in. tape is easier than applying 6-in. paper on small areas. “The roll of tape is right there on their wrist and it’s easy to just take it off without thinking about it and use tape instead of paper on things such as tail lights,” says Poole. But this represents significant waste. “We’re talking a $6 roll of tape versus a log of 400-ft., 36-in. wide paper that costs maybe $35.”
He points out another mistake many shops make: masking each job just once. “They mask, prime and sand, then put it in the booth,” Poole explains. “You need to final mask before putting the car into the booth or you run the risk of contaminating the job.” He adds that it’s also a good idea to check the tape to make sure it’s pressed down firmly before the vehicle enters the booth.
Masking has been made easier by the tools now available to collision repair shops. Combining those tools with an understanding of the fundamentals will produce a precise masking job—the mark of a true craftsperson and one of the pillars of a quality refinish repair.
