Equalizer Goes Abroad

Equalizer Industries president Eric Asbery, international sales director Henri Goudsmit and senior technical advisor Gilbert Gutierrez recently took a two-week trip to visit distributors across Europe. Among their stops were Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and France.

"This was kind of a different approach," says Gutierrez of the trip.

On one particular stop in Italy, they received a bit of a surprise.

"It just so happened that they had problems with the removal of a windshield from a bus," he says. "It was really kind of cool. They had a couple cars and they wanted me to show them how to cut windows out. I told them I'd rather start with the bus. We don't get to do many those-especially a bus made there and manufactured in Europe."

He continues, "They started telling me the problems they were having removing this glass. It was taking them 20 minutes just to remove the moulding-which was probably as tall as I am."

The lengthy, 6-foot mouldings weren't the only issue.

"The windshield was surrounded by tempered pieces. We had to be careful not to break those to get the windshield out," he says.

The demonstration proved to be a perfect one to show the speed of Equalizer's Express 360 and Stingray 220-volt, though.

"I prepped the area and it took me about a minute and a half to remove the moulding using our power tools," Gutierrez says. "That in itself was like a savings. The whole job was taking them two and a half hours to remove the glass, so I already knocked off 27 minutes of their time doing the mouldings.

"We started cutting the windshield out and I had a couple techs I was training and we probably got it out in less than 28 minutes," he says. "That was one of the nice things of going over there and introducing our latest product-it was just an eye opener."

Equalizer also introduced two new tools for protecting pinchwelds, the Ricochet, which is made of heavy vinyl, and the Bounceback, which is made of metal.

So far, he says the company has seen a good response.

"We're hoping to have a newer version of them making them even thinner, because some of the pinchwelds has gotten even smaller, so in some cases you can't even get the thickness of two business cards in between," he says. "So this is kind of a way of us trying to help the technicians out in the field that are pretty accustomed to using the cold knife. Maybe if they have a power tool they can use this [tool] on the inside."

During the two-week tour, the company visited many distributors, some of which set up demonstrations for Equalizer to perform at the offices of their biggest customers.

"A lot of these are big auto glass chains and body-shop customers," adds Gutierrez, who refers to the trip as a "planes, trains and automobiles adventure."

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