Operations Manager Joe Naulty oversees four MAACO locations in Central Florida for Frank Furino. They plan to open at least two more centers in the central part of the state and to provide top quality paint services to their customers. To accommodate this expansion, Naulty and his team acquired a USI North America Chronotech spray booth for its location in Rockledge back in May and are already huge fans of the company and its products.
Naulty knows the paint world well, after working as a Representative for 16 years for DuPont (now Axalta) and covering a huge territory that included everything east of the Mississippi and Puerto Rico. He has worked in the MAACO chain for many years as a manager before getting hired to his current position roughly two years ago. Over the years, Naulty has seen literally every type of spray booth in existence, so when he started looking for a new one, he knew what he wanted.
"I've sprayed in every type of booth you could dream of--you name it," Naulty said. "Whether it is a downdraft, cross draft, semi-down, blow-up booth, homemade with curtain walls--I've been there and done it. I trained painters for many years in all kinds of booths and I can safely say that USI North America makes the finest booths on the market. It's unlike anything I've ever seen!"
When he was working for DuPont, Naulty trained a lot of paint technicians at new MAACO locations, which gave him a good look at the operation and its strengths, he said. "I ended up working for Frank my #1 customer and I haven't looked back since," he said. "At MAACO, we do a lot of spot work and get our fair share of full paint jobs and once they see our quality, they come back. When they get into collisions, they bring their cars to us and with a large customer base, we're busy the majority of the time."
After taking proposals from several booth companies, they chose USI North America for several reasons, primarily quality and cleanliness, Naulty said. "This is by far the best booth we've ever used at any of our locations and I would put it up against any other booth in the state without a doubt. The paint jobs we're getting are by far the best I've ever seen. If there is any dirt in that booth, it's coming off my painters, because it can't get in through the outside. That saves us money and time and the finished product is spectacular. When the customers come here to pick up their vehicles, it's fun to watch their ex<x>pressions."
Installing the USI Chronotech in a small 5,000 sq. ft. facility looked daunting at the outset, but by designing the booth to fit within a limited space with some smart engineering and help from the USI team, everything came together rather nicely. "A typical MAACO location is normally 10,000 sq. ft., so this was a challenge from the beginning," Naulty said. "It was a unique situation, but we got it done and it works beautifully now. Our goal here was to be able to focus more on painting newer, higher quality cars and doing the collision work and that's exactly what we're doing with this amazing USI spray booth. We're filtering all of that type of work here and it's working out well.
"With other paint booths, you get a lot of vibration and when the paint builds up on the fans, it starts falling off into the booth and on the cars," Naulty said. "Every little piece of dirt falls into wet paint. But, with this USI booth, all of the mechanical moving parts are separate, so that all that enters the booth is air from the top. There are no belts, so the electric motors are connected directly to turbines, so there's no slippage or vibration. There are four bag filters outside and more filters in the floor that protects our investment. This booth provides us with so many levels of filtration--nothing ever enters that booth that we don't want in there."
One of the great benefits of the way the booth operates is the fact that Naulty does not have any problems with emissions, he explained. "We don't have little paint particulates flying out of our stack, which is instrumental. We've got five other retail businesses on this lot, so we can't afford to have things like overspray and paint smell out in the air. No one can believe that we're painting cars here at this location, because everything is captured with the filtration and through engineering."
Naulty has made a lot of sage decisions in his career, but purchasing a booth made by USI North America is right at the top of his list. "We're painting several cars every day out of our Chronotech and if we do our job right, everything goes seamlessly. We're now considering USI booths for our new locations after seeing this one performing so incredibly well."