Luke Salter knew the drill. Most times an oversized vehicle arrived at his shop for repair, his technicians would deflate the tires and fight like heck to squeeze the vehicle into their paint booth.
“We would do whatever we could just to get the vehicle in the booth and make it work,” Salter said.
Now with an Ultra XL Paint Booth and Ultra XD Paint Mix Room from Global Finishing Solutions (GFS) and local distributor Platinum Equipment at their shop in Altoona, Wisconsin, Trubilt Collision Center is profiting from additional fleet work and has doubled their number of daily paint cycles.
With a 12-foot-high ceiling, the Ultra XL is tall enough to fit full-size pickup trucks, Sprinter vans and commercial vehicles, including 11-foot-tall FedEx vans that have been repaired at Trubilt. Downdraft airflow in the Ultra XL, combined with the Controlled Airflow Ceiling from GFS, increases contamination control, while widening the booth’s spray zone.
“This booth has allowed us to put more cars through a lot quicker, and now that we have drying capabilities, it makes it a lot easier,” said Salter, whose nearly 10,000-square-foot Altoona shop — which opened in 2018 and expanded by 3,000 square feet in 2023 — averages four to six cycles a day. “It’s kind of a no-brainer, just to do it and do it right, so you don’t have to wish you would have done it sooner instead of later.”
Trubilt’s other location, in nearby Eau Claire, Wisconsin, doubled in size to 20,000 square feet in 2024, with half of their new space dedicated to their rapidly growing calibration business, EC Calibrations. The key to Trubilt’s success over family ownership that dates to 1997 is “staying ahead of the times and being innovative,” said Salter, who teamed with his sister, Amy Wolfe, to purchase both Trubilt shops from their father, Jerry, in 2021. “It seems like we’re always the guinea pig when it comes to things, but that’s OK. I prefer it that way.”
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