Thread: Body Shop layouts

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hello everyone, the guy I work for is going to be building a new shop. I did a search on here for a similar thread, but i couldnt find anything. We are putting up a shop to do restoration work in, it is going to be roughly 5,000 square feet. Does anyone know of good webesites that offer different layouts. I know that it needs to be what we want and what will work for our needs, but it would be nice to have a starting point! So for right now im just looking for some different resources as a starting point! Thanks in advance for the help!

Thats what roughly 60X80 building ?
Remember this , office & bath rooms will take 1-2 car stalls , frame machine/frame jig 1-2 cars stalls , paint booth and Paint mixing room 2-4 stalls , make sure every square footage is used to good advantage is all I can recommend. Thats almost 8 stalls gone for production / working on vehicles .
I dont have any sites you can look at , and there is a wealth of info from others here that will surely help you out .
Spray

There are a lot of variable you haven't addressed. For instance, is it clear span, or do you have support members? Where are the doors? How do you prefer to manage the work flow.....the car moves to the stall for each operation, or does the tech move from car to car while the car stays in a fixed stall (except for paint probably)? Do you have/want a clean area that is separated by fixed walls, or is it feasible to use curtains? And much much more.

Here's one of the options I used when I had my shop. My body shop supplies vendors had computer design programs for doing shop layouts. These took into account the things DW talked about and more. If they believed you'd be buying some of the equipment/fixtures from them they would do the design service for free.

well it's not going to be a very high production shop, it will be resorations with about 3 project going at a time. we are planning on roughly 6 months for each project, start to finish. we will probably only have one frame table, but nothing like a frame rack that a collision shop would use. more than likely there will be two overhead doors next to each other in the front of the building. It would be nice to keep the body and paint side away from the metal side, but it isnt a must. Thank you very much for the help so far! and yes Spray tech, it is going to be roughly 60x80.

Something I stumbled across while searching out an efficient design and layout for my new 8,500 sq/ft shop (still fighting my way through the local planning board) is that Sherwin-Williams offers a design service to assist shop owners and builders with their layouts. For a small $895 fee they will lay it out and provide specs. Click Collision Shop Design to reach the web page where they tell you how to go about getting this done.

Bill S.

Originally Posted by mrmustang

(still fighting my way through the local planning board) is .

You're in New Jersey................I thought bribery was the only way that got done there!!

Originally Posted by Bob Parmenter

You're in New Jersey................I thought bribery was the only way that got done there!!

I would have tried that if it was not for all the tree huggers on the current planning board. What should have been a 2 meeting process has turned into a 2 year ordeal. It is almost to the point that I am thinking about finding an exisiting shop and moving my family. Something I have fought myself over for years as all of my business and car related connections are here and if I move, it will not be a local one. I got so fed up this time around that I just hired a professional planning and engineering firm to push this through. Will it be worth the extra 5-10K in up front costs, I guess we'll find out some time this spring or summer.

Bill S.