Nightmares have a way of creeping up on the unsuspecting. One moment you're snug in bed, sleeping peacefully; the next, you're in a fervid sweat, facing a dark terror that you never dreamed could exist.

Nightmare refinishing jobs come about the same way. A car comes into the shop and everything seems normal. Then, when you least expect it, the job becomes a horrid experience that you only wish were a bad dream.

That's what happened at Rivercity Collision Service in Austin, Texas. When the little Dakota pickup truck pulled into their newer, second shop, Larry Stafford had no indication that it represented anything but a typical refinishing job. But Rivercity was having problems with the infrared lighting system in the shop and had called in an electrician to upgrade the wiring so it would not burn out.

The electrician worked while the Dakota got its new paint job. In the course of his project, the electrician needed to disarm the shop's fire extinguisher system. What he thought would turn the system off actually activated it. Suddenly the freshly painted little pickup (and the whole inside of the paint booth) had a one-inch coating of powder on them. It looked like a dry, powdered snowstorm had suddenly let loose inside the shop.

"I just wondered, 'How are we ever going to fix this? What could we do?'" Stafford recalls. His answer was to let the powdery paint dry on the Dakota, wash the truck, then re-wash it with baking soda. "That was in case there was anything acidic left on the surface," he explains.

Fortunately, the primer and basecoats were well dried before the incident. "We sanded the truck back to the primer, washed it again, and then shot it again," he says.

The results were more than satisfactory and the pickup's owner drove away happy with the job Rivercity had done.

More Typical Debacles
While the powder disaster is, one hopes, a once-in-a-lifetime thing, there are nightmares that recur again and again. Sometimes they are the result of the best-intentioned customer. "The worst is the person who decides to do you a favor and Armor-Alls the inside of the car before bringing it into the shop," says Ron Nagy of Nagy's Body & Frame Shop, Doylestown, Ohio. While it is a good product, Armor-All (and similar products) tends to rinse out on the door and the rockers. Rocker panels with road guards or flat black finishes seem to soak up the protectant fastest of all. The protectant causes fish eyes in any paint job.

"It is almost an endless job to get the Armor-All off the vehicle," Nagy says. He's found that the best agent for removing the material depends on the actual fabric protectant product used. Nagy says that it is his experience that laquor thinner works best, but that the cure is different depending on the particulars of the job. "Laquor thinner cuts it, but you can not always use it in every situation," he says. Another satisfactory answer is Preps-All, he adds.

How can you tell in advance that you're facing a special situation? "Sometimes you sit on the seat and about slide off," Nagy volunteers. But it most cases, by the time the problem is discovered it is too late for the painter to do anything but go back to start. The same holds true for other problems that bug shop owners. Like bugs.

The Ants Come Marching ...
"You mean you've never painted the hood of a car and watched the ants come marching out looking for breakfast?" asks Tom Prescott of The Body Werks, Holly Hill, Fla. The ants, he suspects, are driven out of the inside of the car by the smell of the paint. Although he washes vehicles completely, the ants typically hide on the inside of the car, chasing fallen French fries between the cracks of the seats.

Palmetto bugs (those large, cockroach-like critters typical in Florida) might also present problems in some cases, but Prescott finds that they typically come out earlier in the paint process.

There is not much hope for a paint job marred by insects, whether the damage is caused by tiny fleas or by giant Palmettos. "All you can do is pray that they didn't go in through the color coat," Prescott says. "Or else, you simply repaint the car."

Prescott shakes his head and laughs. "Why don't they ever come out at the basecoat?" he wonders. It seems almost malicious of the ants to add to the hassle by waiting until the clear coat is on before marching out.

Alan Woodard, manager of Auto Collision Specialists in Fuquay Varina, N.C., has had his share of insect problems, too. "Somehow, those bugs just appear," he says. "They might hitch a ride on the painter or they come along with the car."

While he has experienced problems with mosquitoes or flies, he says the resulting damage to the new paint job rarely has been anything major. "It's a risk you take in this business," he says. Depending on how badly the job was marred, he'll either sand or buff the spot out.

As vexing as insect problems are, at some level a shop owner has to admit that an invasion of bugs is more an accidental force of nature than a problem caused by human folly. Many of the painting nightmares shop owners faced are caused by people - more specifically, vehicle owners. You can laugh, or you can cry, but you have to feel for Nick Verona of East Rockford Collision Center, Rockford, Ill., when the owner of a faded 1989 Camry came back to his shop in mid-May and rejected the paint job on the vehicle. "You get cars that are painted by companies that offer low-value paint jobs. It is really hard to get a color match on some of them," Verona says.

He was thrown for a loop when the Camry's owner insisted that the shop match colors to the skimpy single-stage paint job that was done sometime earlier when the owners decided to patch up the rusting vehicle. "There was no way that the panels we painted would match the existing color. The customer was totally against the job we did and insisted that we or the insurance company should pay to do the whole car," Verona continues. "They simply refused acceptance of the vehicle."

This was not the first time Verona had run into a situation where he had to deal with a skimpy paint job done on a budget. But in this case he knew he had to balance the age of the car, the customary fading of the paint, and the fact that the vehicle was silver (life never is easy) against customer satisfaction.

Finally, he opted to prep and repaint the entire vehicle properly with a silver color that any thorough shop would be able to match.

He did catch one small break, though. The insurance company agreed to pick up the cost of blending adjacent panels, so the entire cost of seeing the job done correctly and to the customer's satisfaction did not come out of the Collision Center's budget.

Paint, Then Dust Lightly
Jay Dain, production manager at Drymon's Paint & Body Shop, Ruskin, Fla., might be forgiven if he gets a bit leery of front-end jobs after two recent incidents. He recalls the day they were doing a fender and hood job and the entire filter frame came loose from the ceiling. "Dust poured down all over the car and all over the painter," he recalls. The situation ended up a bit akin to Stafford's powder bath from the fire extinguisher system.

Was the dust bath as bad as the time the end of the painter's air hose came loose at the gun end? Again, Drymon's was handling a routine front-end job. When the air hose popped, the painter understandably lost control of the system. Within seconds, the hose was whipping around on the car and the paint got sprayed all over. "It beat up the paint job pretty bad," he says. He laughs now, but it added another 10 or 12 hours of lost time to an otherwise straightforward new panel and hood project.

In both cases, the solution to the problem was fairly direct. Dain let the paint dry and then sanded the car down to the color coat. Then he re-shot the color and the clear.

Will Insurance Pay?
In most of these cases, the insurance company is going to be hesitant to put up any of its extra dollars to cover the lost shop time. While East Rockford Collision was able to get some cooperation from the Camry's insurance company, the insurer typically will see nightmare incidents as something that occurred outside the collision. So, the insurer is unwilling to pony up more money even though it expects the car owner's vehicle to be fixed properly.

"Maybe you can bill for an extra hour or half-hour of cleanup time, but it's hardly worth the paperwork at that point," Nagy says.

His best advice is similar to that given to anyone beset by nightmares: "Just try to forget about it. You have to try to black those incidents out so you don't go insane. Stick them in the black hole of your mind," Nagy says.

Stick them there - along with all the other goblins and gremlins that haunt refinishing shops.

Curt Harler is a freelance writer based in Strongsville, Ohio.

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