Got a 3-day run last month where every car was a comeback, and I can't decide if it was my fault or the insurance adjuster's | Auto Body Repairers - nhfree.com
Got a 3-day run last month where every car was a comeback, and I can't decide if it was my fault or the insurance adjuster's
Last month I had three days straight where every single car that rolled out came back with some kind of issue, and I'm still trying to figure out who to blame. Monday a rear bumper job came back because the blend line on the quarter panel looked off in direct sunlight, Tuesday a door skin had a wave I swear wasn't there when I checked it, and Wednesday a car came back for a dust nib in the clear that I know I should have caught. I've been doing this 14 years and normally I get maybe one comeback a month, so three in three days felt like the wheels came off. My painter says the new waterborne clear we switched to in March flashes too fast in our booth, but I keep wondering if I just got sloppy rushing because the adjuster cut my hours on all three jobs. The flip side is maybe I should have pushed back on the hours before I ever touched the cars, not after. Any of you had a streak like that, and did you trace it to the product, the hours, or just a bad week in your own hands?
Three years back I had five comebacks in two weeks after our shop switched primer brands, and I swore up and down it was my hands getting lazy. Turns out the primer was shrinking different under the new clear and every edge I trusted was lying to me. What changed my mind was keeping a log for a month: booth temp, product batch, hours on the ticket, and what got cut. The pattern showed up fast, and it was the hours cut plus one bad batch of clear, not me. I used to blow off the log idea as a waste of time, but now I won't spray a big job without writing the batch number down. Your painter might be onto something with the flash time, but the cut hours are the thing I'd track first, because rushing is what turns a small product quirk into a comeback.