Thursday 1/11/24
Today I got settled in and my first assignment of the day was to wash a car, after I finished washing ad drying it he had me move the car and park it. It was a stick shift and ive never driven one before so he taught me how to drive stick shift and I only went into first gear and reverse. It was awkward having to use both feet and learn how to use the clutch properly to prevent stalling, after I got the hang of it I went to go park it. I got another assignment and it was to sand down the putty which is used to fill in the dents of the car, I sanded down like the trunk area of the car then I had to move towards the front bumper of it but we didn't have the right material for it so I had to leave it and do it a different day. So once I finished that I had to mix the putty with some sort of paste that made it hard and so after it had time to dry we would go sand it down so that it was as smooth as possible and it felt like the dent was never there and it was on a Van so it took quite a while. After we finished on the van the day was over and we just went over what I could do tomorrow and how my experience is going so far.
Wednesday 1/10/24
First day of internship at Manny's Auto Body & Paint Sop, me and my mentor discussed future projects that I could work on and he gave me a tour around the shop he also showed me some of the cars I could help prep all the steps for it to be painted. I was mentioning that besides the hands on labor I can help by editing videos for there instagram and also help make a youtube channel and edit the videos for them to be posted. Also I could help them make a website so they could put it in there bios of the social media accounts so people can maybe contact and just find it easier to access contact information and such on. Today's task was a light load, he had me sand down a front bumper with 600 grit sandpaper. After I completed that task I had to dry the front bumper off with an air compressor so it could evaporate all the extra water after it was dried I had to find all the small scratches and use this putty so it would fill the scratches. Once the scratches are all filled with putty and dried I had to sand the extra putty to make the bumper as smooth as possible. He then gave me the task to tape off the part of the bumper we didn't want to get paint on, once finished we put it up on this rack so I could spray a type of spray on the bumper that would allow for the actual first paint coat to stick nice and easy.