HIstory

               I started out as a young boy helping my dad in the paint shop’s where he worked. on weekends and summers was when i began to learn my skills. growing up in a family of body repair men you learn to do it right or you’ll never hear the end of it. Everyone on my dads side of the family worked in the auto body repair industry. they all knew what to look for and would rag on you if they could see where the repair was made. i learned fast how to do it right. not only did the repair have to be invisible  to a professional !!!!  it had to last.  Over and over they would preach, no matter how good you are!!!  the paint job won’t last without the proper use of the right materials. Here’s another one, there’s more than one way to repair something...   then there’s the right way.......     less than 10 % of what i learned over the last thirty years can be found in any book.....

    My dad bought me my first motorcycle at age 9. it was love at first  sight.  a z-50, it took just 25 cents to fill it.  that  little dirt bike was my first custom job.  nothing fancy... just a three stage candy red with big flake. that was the thing back then, and today too, in some parts of town.  it also had an ink transfer of my hero evil kinevil on the top of the tank. I received so much praise from my uncles (and my dad) that a little light bulb lit in my head and i knew from a young age  what i’d love to do for a living. At that age i really didn’t know what  my uncles meant  when they would tell people  that I wanted to be a starving artist.

               Customizing no matter if it’s cars or motorcycles comes and goes with the trends. so its really hard for any custom painter to make a good living all of the time.  in working with my dad and his brothers  growing up i saw many air brush artists in desperate need of  work.  because all they could do was  airbrush art or custom graphics. the guys who knew how to perform back to factory repairs and were good at it never had a problem in having plenty of work or money.  so I went for the money and painted my first car by the age of twelve. it wasn’t an all over paint job.  just the lt, side of the car was being repaired. both doors had a key scratch to the metal. the color was a light blue metallic so i had to blend the front fender and the qt, panel. The repair looked so good the customer wanted to give the painter (my dad) a tip for a job well done. when my dad told the customer that  his son had repaired and painted his car. a twelve year old little boy,,, and that it was my first start to finish repair job....    he couldn’t believe it. the shop manager told the customer i performed the repairs as well. I don’t think the customer believed the manager either because i never received a tip.........

        I continued to work in the automotive repair industry with the goal of landing a lead painters position in a big car dealership. By the time i turned twenty one i had done just that.  Big car dealership and big money. I was the youngest  lead painter working for a car dealership. most other lead painters were at least ten years older.  even though the money was great, there was something missing. I painted eight to nine cars a day. five days a week and hardly ever got the chance to meet the customer. I felt like i had become a robot. the work was the same thing day after day. I was no longer being challenged. thats when i got back into motor cycles.  i went out and bought me a brand new cbr 600 f-2. it was the baddest 600 cc motorcycle of the day. i fell in love all over again and it wasn’t long before i broke it down for custom painting.

                    After custom painting my bike i started meeting people who liked my work and wanted me to custom paint their bikes. so i started custom painting motorcycles in the garage of my house on my spare time while still working for the car dealership. i knew that i couldn’t quit my job and expect to make a good living with just custom painting motorcycles.  then one day i had a person bring me some parts from his recently crashed motorcycle and he asked if i could fix them.  i  responded, why wouldn’t you just buy new parts. he then went on this big rampage about how much!!! every little part cost!!!  all i could see was dollar signs.  Again a little light bulb lit up in my head. I had never heard of a shop that did motorcycle body repair so I started checking into why.

                 I found two reasons. one, the motorcycle  industry is very very small compared to the  automotive industry. two,  really good painters who know how to color match are hard to almost impossible to find. in the automotive industry paint companies make mixing formulas to match factory colors on cars, that way a painter only has to look up a mixing formula for the paint code on the car he’s painting. no thinking, just mixing and if the color didn’t match they would just blend the adjacent panels so that the customer couldn’t tell.

                  so there was my challenge.... to go from two stage colors typical on cars with mixing formulas, to mixing and matching from scratch two, three, and four stage colors on motorcycles. 

                   After about six months i had out grown my little two car garage and even though the money in the car industry was better, there was no love and no challenge. I made the choice for love and went into business for myself. a close friend came up with the name Pauleez and the rest is history.