Mirka India, a subsidiary of Finnish Multinational KWH Mirka OY, has announced the launch of its latest dust free sanding system called the OSP. OSP has been designed to significantly reduce repair times and costs and therefore both improve the business profitability of a car repairer and customer satisfaction of the car owner by turning around a vehicle sent in for repair much faster than any conventional system.
The Optimized Surface Preparation system, the first of its kind in the world, was launched globally at the Automechanica trade fair in Frankfurt and is slowly being rolled out across the Globe, with India being the second country after Mexico to have a full-fledged release.
The system which consists of unique abrasives (numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4), a special tool which is like a conventional sanding block but is a special Orbital sander along with an industrial vacuum unit all mounted on a special 5 s trolley shrinks the repair area by well over 20% compared with conventional repair techniques currently in use. This results in reduced labor and in a significant saving of subsequent paint consumption (because of the smaller repair surface) resulting in a car repairer improving his profit significantly.
Among the other unique features of the abrasives is the numbering which is aligned with the steps involved in car repair. For example the abrasive numbered 1 is the first abrasive to be used to strip the paint and expose the damaged area. Normally in India most abrasive manufacturers follow a complex system of numbering based on the standard set out by FEPA (Federation of European Producers of Abrasives) and choosing the right abrasive to complete a job is difficult since paint surfaces vary in hardness. With the OSPs grains optimized to ideally suit each process of the repair the OSP system has simplified this complexity in a big way.
The system which was launched in Ludhiana yesterday was attended by a large section of body shop owners, interested members of the paint industry and executives of from the automotive world from across Punjab, who were exposed to a practical demonstration of how it works along with a brief on how the system was developed.
According to Mr. Manoj Soni, the Managing Director designate of Mirka India, the plan is to selectively launch this state of the art system only with high volume body shops since they would be the ones able to realize its full benefit.