Laura Bertolli

Submitted by guest writer, Tyler Pendleton When you’re looking for a car, you want everything to be perfect. You want the right model, the right MPG, the right price most importantly, but what about the right color? Does a certain colored car help us in any way? On a slow moving street, some people text, and others look at the cars around them. When you see one that catches your eye, you like the car a little more. Or an advertisement on a cool looking car makes you pay more attention to it. A car's paint job is like a person's clothing, it classifies you in your own way. An orange and black car in the San Francisco Bay Area may show a Giants fan driving, or a flat black car could show importance on the inside. Many colors relate to different ideas in your brain. So when you’re getting the perfect car why do you choose the color you want?  It’s because your brain has its own theories on what colors “look good to you.” When you see something that triggers a good memory, y...

Over the past 20 plus years of running Bertolli's, there have been many changes in the way we paint cars. Before my time, there was lacquer. A thin hard paint that was applied in many coats and polished to look great. Unfortunately, the hardness of the paint led to a short paint life and eventually the paint would crack into 'chickenfeet'. You can see this on some classic cars that haven't been restored. When I entered the industry, urethane was just taking hold. Single stage paint was still being used, but more and more manufacturers were using a base coat/clear coat system which looked shinier and had more durability due to the clear coat. Solvent based urethane has worked well for almost twenty years, but the effect on the environment has brought us water-borne paint. We have been using water-based primers for a few years and have had excellent results. This was the first stage in lowering the VOC or volatile organic compounds, that are released into the air d...