Torrey Pines Collision Center Adds Second Commercial Paint Booth

SAN DIEGO, CA, Aug. 28, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SAN DIEGO, CA - August 28, 2026 -

Torrey Pines Collision Center has installed a second large commercial paint booth at its Sorrento Valley facility, a high-specification unit that brings the shop's in-house spraying capacity to two and keeps complete vehicle refinishing on site rather than sublet to outside painters.

Torrey Pines Collision Center provides Auto Body Paint for motorists across Sorrento Valley and the surrounding San Diego area, covering refinishing, custom paint work, paint matching and complete or full-vehicle paint jobs. The second booth doubles the number of sealed, filtered, and temperature-controlled environments the shop can run at once, which matters because the booth is the single piece of equipment that decides whether a finish cures the way the coating manufacturer intended.

Booth conditions govern outcomes that are invisible on collection day but determine how a repair ages. Waterborne basecoat-clearcoat refinishing needs controlled airflow and a stable temperature to cure into a hard, sealed surface. Airborne contamination that settles into a wet clear coat is a defect no amount of polishing afterwards will remove, and spraying a full vehicle outside a booth introduces exactly the variables a booth exists to eliminate.

The second booth also bears on color work across a whole car. Paint fades unevenly from panel to panel as a vehicle ages, so the color on a car in service is rarely the color recorded against its factory code. The shop reads the finish as it actually is using color-matching spectrophotometry, and paint matching on a complete respray requires every panel to agree with its neighbors rather than with a code sheet. Running two booths allows a large job to be staged across both without competing for a single space.

A complete paint job involves more disassembly than spraying. Doors, handles, lamps and trim are removed so that shuts, jambs, and edges are prepared and coated rather than masked around, which is what separates a full respray from a resprayed exterior. Reassembly then has to return every panel to its original alignment, because a gap that has shifted will catch the light differently once the finish is uniform.

Patrick Mead, Owner-Operator, said the decision came down to keeping control of the work. "Complete paint jobs are the part of this trade where sending the work out costs you the result," Patrick Mead said. "If the spraying happens somewhere else, I cannot stand behind the finish the same way, and I cannot plan around a booth I do not own. Having both booths here means the paint work is ours from the first panel to the last, and our paint and repairs carry a lifetime warranty."

Paint work at the shop sits alongside a collision repair operation staffed by I-CAR trained technicians, and the same refinishing standards apply whether a job involves a single panel or an entire vehicle. Coastal exposure is a standing factor in the local market. Vehicles kept within reach of the marine layer contend with salt held in suspension, which works continuously on panel edges, wheel arch lips, and anywhere a stone chip has already broken the surface. Corrosion protection applied beneath a finish is what decides whether a repair holds for years or starts lifting at the seams, and that layer goes on inside the booth as part of the same controlled process.

Refinishing intersects with the shop's collision work more often than a standalone paint job suggests. Panels replaced after an impact arrive in primer and need coating to match a vehicle that has aged in service. Rust repair involves cutting out corroded metal, rebuilding the panel, and refinishing the area so the repair does not read as a repair afterwards. Both draw on the same booth capacity and the same color reading process.

For vehicle owners, the practical effect of two booths is that complete paint work no longer leaves the premises. A car that is stripped, prepared, sprayed and reassembled under one roof is handled by the technicians who assessed it, with no handover point at which responsibility for the finish becomes unclear. That continuity is the same argument the shop makes for keeping structural work in-house.

The second booth is installed at the Sorrento Valley site, which has operated at the same address since 2006 and is now a second-generation family business. Images of recent refinishing work are posted to the shop's Instagram page.

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For more information about Torrey Pines Collision Center LLC, contact the company here:

Torrey Pines Collision Center
Patrick Mead
(858) 350-0397
tpcollisioncenter@gmail.com
11633 Sorrento Valley Rd, Ste 102
San Diego, CA 92121

Patrick Mead