Eddie Lupinek is a skeptic. It’s in his nature to question, analyze and think through everything. Especially when it comes to equipment for Eddie’s Auto Body, his shop in the small town of East Haddam, Conn.
“I don’t necessarily take everything as it’s presented,” says Lupinek, the second-generation owner of the family business, founded by his father in 1956. “I think about things a lot and I’m always jotting down ideas. I have all of these sketches everywhere.”
Lupinek and his wife, Carol Lupinek, who together run the 3,300-square-foot shop, are firm believers in the ability of ingenuity and old-fashioned hard work to drive success—it has at their facility, especially in the paint department. When they were unable to find a paint booth that met their needs, they built their own, one that is turning heads in their market, drastically reducing energy costs and helping the shop complete vehicles faster.
It’s a reflection of the progressive thinking that has helped the little repair center breach $1 million in annual sales without a single direct repair relationship.
Building a Better Booth
In recent years, Eddie’s Auto Body had grown to the point where it could no longer handle the volume of traffic coming through its doors. About a year ago, the shop was repairing 50–60 vehicles a month, but it had the potential to repair closer to 70.
The shop’s biggest bottleneck was its paint booth, Eddie Lupinek says.
“We had an old cross-flow booth, which 30 years ago was fine,” Lupinek says. “But it was getting outdated.”
He had known for years that the booth should be updated, but until Carol Lupinek joined the shop as office manager about five years ago, he hadn’t been able to free up enough time to solve the problem. Knowing he wanted a downdraft booth, he researched his options, but none of them quite matched the vision he had spent years developing in his head.
“I looked at everything that has come out, and what I wanted, certain things that I was looking for—economical to use and creating a safe work environment and all of this kind of stuff—I was not seeing them come in the same package,” Eddie Lupinek says. “So when I couldn’t get what I wanted, I decided to make it.”
But before the booth was built, Eddie Lupinek discovered what he called the “missing ingredient.”
At a trade show last year, he came across a Canadian-built infrared catalytic drying unit from a company called Sun-Spot. Though he was highly skeptical as always, he decided to purchase a couple of units and test them in the shop. What he found was that the product, similar to those used to reduce dry times in the U.K., was able to dry primer in a few minutes, waterborne paint in as little as 6 minutes—and it could cure clearcoats in 10 minutes. The new booth would be built around this technology, he decided.