David Fermani said:
Very nice website and work space. Seems like a wonderful gallery to show off you work. Can you explain how your 25 bay shop is set up? I'd love to see pictures of the whole place. Is this an underground parking garage? Are there wash bays?
Hi David,
Thank you for the kind words. My detailing studio is located inside a new commercial retail/office/f&b complex at ground level which we picked so that low-profile cars can access the floors without any steep inclines/declines. The studio is security-equipped with CCTV's, gated-access, proximity card systems, complete fire-fighting system and a third-party central monitoring system. It's about 12,000 sq ft so we placed security as a priority to monitor the entire area. Here are some photos to share...
Surface Preparation
Essentially I've got 4-wet bays that comes with it's own quad-stage de-ionized water purification system for surface preparation and includes individual cold & steam high-pressure jets. Once the wet-works are completed, I've got a combination of air-compressor dryers and forced-induction blowers to dry each car effectively.
Interior Detailing
On the interior detailing portion it's 8 bays. It's fitted with specialized steam extractors that can clean exotic materials like deep-pile carpets and alcantara at 5% moisture and also regular extractors for general upholstery.
Paintwork Detailing
Moving to the paintwork detailing bays, I've got 8-bays which are a combination of standard detailing bays, vertical-access detailing bays(lifts) and discreet detailing bays(curtained-off to keep new-cars being polished discreetly). This excludes overflow sections. Each detailing bay(that includes interior and wet bays as well) is packed with fluorescent lighting equipment which is daylight balanced for accurate color-rendering of each car's paintwork at approx 400lux. Each car is flanked by a secondary bank of four metal-halide inspection floodlights to pick-out every single imperfection mimicking variable daylight exposure.
Special Applications Booth
In the furthest section of the detailing studio is a special applications booth which is equipped with an air filtration system complete with an extractor similar to paint booths as we use it to apply our proprietary paintwork coatings and is cured with several banks of UV-lights. This clean-room is the brightest and also where we perform custom 3M vehicle film wraps and for window tints as well.
Inspection Rooms
We nickname this the darkroom because of the black walls, ceiling & marble flooring. They absorb the lights from the florescent tubes, metal halide inspection floodlights and PLC lamps. It doesn't bounce or reflect light from the surfaces. These combination of lights allow us to inspect the car in the various low ambient settings as those found on motor-show floors, showrooms and hotel lobbies. They contrast with the paintwork detailing bay lights. This section is fully air-conditioned and has it's own ionizer and air filtration system. They double up as thermostatically-monitored storage rooms over extended periods of time.
Lightroom
This is a photography studio purpose built for shooting cars. It spans a massive overhead lightbox engineered with 400 fluoro tubes and has 10 fans cooling the lights. Walls and the fire-resistant polyurethane flooring are white in color. I use it to commercially produce assignments and custom albums for my clients seeking to document their automobile collection.
The Lounge
Here is the customer lounge which is an industrial grunge design and has audiophile speakers, a plasma screen, a concrete-cast conference table equipped with powerpoints for notebooks, WiFi-access, a drinks dispenser and finally is iPad-equipped for clients to browse and play games while waiting for their cars.
That's the place in a nutshell. There's a separate office area, a children's room for my kids to do their homework/play and a nicely sorted warehouse.
