Ford body shops gear up for aluminum

The first 2015 aluminum-body Ford F-150 pickup will hit the road in December, but Ron Needham and his crew of technicians at the Prestige Ford collision shop in Garland, Texas, expect to see their first repair job much sooner than that.

That's because a few pickups will sustain minor damage en route to dealerships. And Needham's shop plans to be ready for them.

All Ford vehicles destined for Ford's Southwest region come to a railyard in Mesquite, Texas, where they are transferred to trucks. Occasionally, vehicles get dinged coming off the trains.

When that happens, they're trucked 12 miles to Prestige Ford, where collision technicians perform body and paint repairs for American Road, an insurance company that covers Ford vehicles against damage while they're in transit to dealerships.

Prestige Ford is just one of more than 1,500 dealers and independent shops gearing up for Ford's aluminum revolution with the new F-150. The investment is significant, but they see solid opportunities as aluminum changes the landscape of the collision business.

"We repair all their vehicles damaged in transit," says Needham, the affable fixed operations director at Prestige Ford. Though no pickups have arrived in dealerships yet, Ford has begun producing them at its Dearborn Truck Plant, so Prestige Ford is likely to see damaged vehicles even before the first one gets tagged in a fender bender.

The early work will give Needham and his crew a chance to hone the skills they learned earlier this year in aluminum training sessions organized by I-CAR, the Inter-Industry Conference on Auto Collision Repair.

The 2015 F-150 is a big deal because no company previously has manufactured a mass-market pickup with an aluminum body.

Aluminum has less "metal memory" than steel, meaning it does not regain its shape as easily when it is bent or deformed. Also, collision shops need separate work areas for aluminum. Dust or filings of aluminum can damage steel in an electrochemical process call galvanic corrosion.

That means dealers who want to repair the trucks need to buy special tools and train technicians in aluminum techniques. Prestige Ford has invested about $56,000 to buy equipment including a special rivet gun, a vacuum for aluminum dust, a toolbox and floor-to-ceiling vinyl curtains to capture dust.

Since rolling out its training plans to dealers at the National Automobile Dealers Association convention in New Orleans early this year, Ford has encouraged dealers and independent repair shops to prepare for the aluminum pickup by training technicians, purchasing aluminum-specific equipment and joining the company's aluminum-repair network.

Paul Massie, Ford powertrain and collision marketing manager, said: "We have over 750 dealers enrolled, and our target was 750" for the network. "Our target for the independent shops was 750 also, and we've got well over 800. The majority of the dealers already have the equipment. Even more of them have their technicians trained."

Ford has walked a tightrope with aluminum repair, emphasizing that repairing aluminum requires some special equip-ment and different techniques than fixing steel bodies. At the same time, Ford has said that any body shop still can perform most routine repairs. The special equipment is necessary primarily for larger structural jobs.