3 Mistakes to Avoid When Pursuing an Auto Body Repair Technician Career

If you’re aspiring to become a technician in auto body repair, you need to have the skills, knowledge, and patience to provide a great quality of service for your customers when fixing up their vehicles. With many qualified auto body shops out there, you’ll need to not let your inexperience have the best of you if you want to launch a successful career.

At ATC, you’ll get hands-on training in auto body repair. Your training will help you along the way, but you may start your career at a fast paced automotive body shop that demands a fast turnaround. Don’t let the fast turnaround force you to make mistakes and undermine the quality of work you do for customers.

Read on to know the three mistakes you should avoid!

1.   An Auto Body Repair Technician Not Masking off Sections of the Vehicle

For a technician in auto body repair, sometimes fast paced working environments may make you involuntarily make masking mistakes. Try not to cut corners when you start applying masking to a customer’s vehicle. Before paint is applied to the primed areas of a vehicle, you’ll need to carefully and thoroughly mask every exposed area that won’t require any paint job. Always check that all areas aren’t exposed when you launch your auto body repair technician career. Areas like wirings, suspension parts, door handles – if no paint is required, tires, rims, and mufflers all need to be carefully masked, so that no paint will go right on them. If not, you’ll end up making the vehicle look unprofessional, and will cost you more time to redo and fix.

2.   Not Using the Right Sandpaper Grit

After your auto body technician training, you should use the right type of sandpaper grit to make a vehicle’s paint job correctly stick without being removed. Sandpaper grit ranges from 24 to 4000. The lower the number the stiffer the sandpaper will be. The higher the number the smoother the sandpaper will be. You should start with the higher sandpaper grit to try and get your auto body work done safely without causing unnecessary damage by scratching the surface of the vehicle. You can use low grit range sandpaper to flatten out rough surface areas when coats of paint have been applied to a vehicle causing an uneven surface. High grit sandpaper on the other hand can be used to deliver a smooth and clean finishing touch to the paint by eliminating minor scratches.

3.   Not Aligning Body Panels Correctly

Another common mistake you should avoid when you start your auto body repair career, is aligning auto body panels incorrectly once you complete the necessary auto body work and repairs. Auto body panels have become well designed by car manufacturers, so you won’t even notice any major gaps when they’re put in place, because they fit quite nicely. Because of the fast-paced turnaround, some auto body technicians tend to rush aligning the auto body panels incorrectly, causing them to have major gaps in between. They don’t just look bad and unprofessional but can also end up coming apart while the customer is driving. You have to take your time aligning the panels, because it will save you time and money by not having to redo it.

Are you interested in auto body technician careers?

Contact ATC Surrey for more information!