"Back then, you could buy a compressor and a paint booth and you were in business," Owner Doug Nelson said.  "I would paint whatever came in the door -- cars, boats, even an airplane."

Around 1983, the shop began performing body repair and getting more involved with collision repair work, Nelson said.  "Once you had done paint work for a customer they would tell you that you did such a good job that now they wanted you to work on their car that had been in an accident."

When Dave Horne, the general manager, joined the shop in 1988, he also brought with him a following of motorcycle customers interested in custom paint work.  "I had just bought a Harley, and I did a custom paint job on it that attracted a lot of attention," he said.

While the shop has continued to do custom automotive and motorcycle paint work, restorations, and vehicle modifications, Nelson said the majority of the growth for the business, which now occupies the entire 15,000-square-foot building where it first began, has been in collision repair work.

"The custom stuff is kind of fill-in work now," Nelson said, adding that it makes up just 10 to 20 percent of the shop's business today.  "We get a lot of people who come to us because of our reputation.  I'm not the cheapest guy in town, but if somebody wants to pay for quality, we will take in the job."

The shop has grown to employ three body techs, a painter, three preppers, two detailers, and his son, Jerred, who helps out in the office as the parts manager but also does some of the shop's custom painting, Nelson said. 

While the shop experiences very little employee turnover, the difficulty of finding experienced technicians who understand how to quickly and efficiently perform custom and restoration work is part of why the business has gradually gravitated to collision repairs, Nelson said.

"The hardest thing is trying to find guys who can work on that older stuff," he said.  "We have one technician who has been here for 20 years and can really do anything. Without him, we probably would turn away even more of this work."

Even with the custom work there are many variations, Nelson said.  "I would rather do more custom paint on newer vehicles where you don't have to block and prime so much," he said.  "It's nice to do a nice custom paint job on a car without having to work with a bunch of rust and Bondo."

"You take a new car apart, and it comes apart really easy and goes back together well," Horne said.  "But with older cars, everything is rusted and breaks and then you can't find the clips, and it becomes really tedious."

While Nelson said he still likes to do custom paint work for motorcycles and autos, the shop works best when the customer already likes work it has done and is willing to give him some leeway in coming up with something that will look good.

"The straight-forward stuff is pretty profitable," he said, "but when you kind of need to work through the design with the customer to figure out what they want, you can invest a lot of time."

The shop is also recommended by local speed parts supplier Darkside Automotive for installation and painting of body kits, wings, hood scoops, and other accessories, Nelson said.  "Even though everything is new, a lot of times they don't fit so well out of the box, so we have to do a little massaging," he said.

"The collision stuff is where the volume is and where you get the repeat customers," he said.  "The custom stuff takes a lot of time, which means it's a long time before you get paid."

"We've been trying to focus on the collision work," Horne said.  "Since we became a State Farm DRP, we have been very busy, and it gets hard to fit in the custom work.  "It's quicker money, and it's not as tedious."

Nelson said that because the collision jobs come and go much more quickly, they improve the shop's cash flow.  "The collision work pays the bills now," he said.  "We're hooked up with State Farm for direct deposits.  We send them a bill, and a couple of days later the money is in our account."

Whether the shop is working on a new car or a restoration, getting the correct parts when it needs them is an important part of the process, so Nelson said he looks for parts suppliers that have a good inventory and experienced salespeople. 

"Courtesy Chevrolet is great and we buy a lot from them," he said.  "Galpin also takes very good care of us.  We also get good service from Kobe Honda, Northridge Toyota, and Keyes Lexus."

"When I get on the phone with a dealer, I want to give them the order and have them know what I am talking about so they can just say, 'Yes. Yes. Thank you,' and we're done," Horne said.

The shop sprays Spies Hecker and House of Kolor paints in its modern Garmat downdraft booth, which is used for most of the collision repair work, and an older crossflow that is still used for much of the custom work, Nelson said.

While the switchover to waterborne has gone fairly smoothly, Nelson said there were still some unexpected costs involved, including additional times for spray-outs, an extra hazardous-waste pickup for the waterborne waste, and booth filters that clog up about three times as fast because of the additional airflow.

One unique challenge for the shop is the need to be able to match the many custom paint colors that the shop has created over the years.  For instance, he pointed to a Harley in the shop that had been painted and was returning to have hard cases matched to it. 

"You get used to a product that has worked really well for you, and then they take it away from you," Nelson said.  "It's been a challenge."