Background and Solution
A customer has a very difficult sealer seam where sealer is
required. The difficulty is in the location – on the underside of the car body,
about 3 feet long on the rocker area. What complicates this even more, is that
the sealer bead requires a skive operation so the sealer won’t interfere with a
trim panel installed after paint.
Solution
After weeks of development, the
perfect shaped sealer tip was developed to run the bead, the shape allowed the
operator to stand at a comfortable height and still cover the seam reliably. At
the final run off, someone made the observation that you could almost mount a
skive tool on the extension and seal and skive all in one pass. So a movable
steel bracket was added on which a skive tool could be affixed.
Results
The customer has purchased two of
these and continues to refine it. As is of then the case with anything
adjustable, different operators have different preferences on how the extension
is configured. One of the photos shows how one person has removed the skive
mount bracket and replaced the wide sealer tip with a brush. At this point it
appears that there will be two or three versions of this extension,
leaving the operators happy that they do not have to bend down to look at the
underside of the car body any more.