Stick to Your Knitting

The old-fashioned advice of "Stick to your knitting" has never been more appropriate than now, as it relates to me and this newsletter.

For the younger crowd, who may not have heard the old expression, this does not mean that I'll be making sweaters and socks at industry meetings. Stick to your knitting means to stay with what time and experience prove that you do well.

Last year I experimented with a new feature page called "New and Notable," the focus of which was to be personal testing and reporting on new products that have been introduced to the Collision Repair Industry.

The first article covered 3M's new products and was well received without controversy.

My recent new product article, July’s "The Future Is Clear," covering a new clear introduced by DuPont, created a firestorm of objective and not so objective criticism.

Basically, the in-field and technical homework that I should have done to compare that product with other competitive products just did not get done.

While I did in fact use the product, and it did perform as reported, it has been brought to my attention, by e-mail, letter, and phone, that there are other products out there that many people feel are equal to or faster drying than the product covered in my article.

The benchmark that was referenced in the article was an arbitrary benchmark based on datasheets provided to us here at INSIGHT.

INSIGHT's "knitting" over the past ten years has been the business side of collision repair, and I feel that we have covered it well, and in an un-biased fashion.

From this point on, we will "stick to our knitting." If there are any more New and Notable articles, you can depend on our pledge that they will cover products related strictly to the business side of collision repair. It was not my intention to provide our readers with biased information.

I feel a little like the student sent to the blackboard to write something 100 times. Trust me - writing this mea culpa just once has been enough.