Mark: Hi, it’s Mark from Top Local, we’re here with Alex Wardle of Tom’s Custom Autobody in Port Coquitlam. How’re you doing today Alex?
Alex: I’m doing fantastic, how’re you doing Mark?
Mark: Good, so you survived the move and that’s what we’re going to talk about today, is you’ve opened a brand new location for Tom’s at 1830 Kingsway in Port Coquitlam. Tell us about that.
Alex: We have, so we’ve opened two new shops. We have Tom’s Custom Autobody in Coquitlam now on Tupper Road and I’m now sitting in our brand new shop which is Tom’s Custom Autobody in Port Coquitlam at 1830 Kingsway and I’ll just pull up a shot here of our new building. so about a year ago we started down this road of getting a new building and essentially what happened is we bought this big building and we converted it into a brand new collision shop and this shop is absolutely brand new from front to back, it’s 13,000 square feet, we handle all types of insurance claims here, for example, we’re an ICBC car valet store, we handle Family Insurance, Canadian Direct Insurance, Intact Insurance and many out of province insurance companies. So if you’re traveling from Alberta or from the rest of Canada, we do work with many of the other insurance companies that are not necessarily native to British Columbia. One of the things that makes this facility really neat, is that we’ve got a brand new state-of-the-art aluminum room which is 2,400 square feet and it’s curtained off, it has brand new aluminum welding equipment, great for the new F150 and great for any year of the higher end Mercedes, BMW, Audi and a lot of other cars that are now starting to substitute aluminum parts on the car in order to keep it nice and light for fuel economy savings. So that’s something that’s not common in the industry to have these new rooms. One of the other things we invested in when we came here was a new state-of-the-art 3D electronic measuring system by Chief, so we now can pull up the frame specs on your vehicle if your car has been in a larger accident and we can get that vehicle right back to manufacturers specifications with 3D imaging and a print out on the vehicle. We can tell instantly if your frame is out or not out based on laser measuring which is really neat. The other thing that is kind of cool is that we have invested in two brand new spray booths that are full downdraft capability at 31 feet, so that allows us to push through a lot of the larger vehicles that we’re seeing in the marketplace today which would be like your quad cab F150’s or F350’s or Dodge trucks or anything of that nature, all the way down obviously to still doing your BMW, but those larger spray booths allow for a better finish on larger vehicles because the vehicle fits fully within the downdraft capabilities. So this is the picture of the building during the day and here’s a photo of our building at night.
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