Heritage: 50 Years of American-Made Finishing Environments

Global Finishing Solutions was born in October 1975, when Jerry Bowe — armed with a decade of national sales experience in the spray booth industry — founded JBI, Inc. in Osseo, Wisconsin, and began building spray booths for aerospace, automotive, and industrial customers. From the start, the company's ambition was larger than its footprint: by 1990, JBI had outgrown its original facility and opened what was at the time described as "one of the most modern and efficient spray booth manufacturing facilities" in the industry at its current address on Norway Road in Osseo.

The acquisitions that shaped modern GFS happened fast in the 2000s. The Curran Group — an Illinois-based family holding company with roots going back to 1918 — acquired JBI in 1999. Shortly after, Curran added Blu-Surf Combustion Equipment Company, bringing industrial oven and burner system expertise into the portfolio. Then JBI merged with Team Blowtherm, a leading name in the automotive refinish booth market, to create Global Finishing Solutions. Milbanks Systems followed, adding oven panel technology. By the time manufacturing was consolidated to Osseo in 2011, GFS had assembled one of the most complete finishing environment portfolios in North America under a single roof.

The 2013 expansion — 68,000 square feet of additional manufacturing space and 33,000 square feet of office space, plus an on-site Center for Excellence training and R&D facility — reflects where GFS stands today: over 300 employees, ISO 9001:2015 certified, and 50 years into manufacturing the booths that paint everything from collision-damaged passenger cars to United States Air Force fighter jets and C-17 transport aircraft.

The Finishing Environment: What GFS Actually Sells

Every spray gun brand on this site delivers coating to a surface. GFS engineers the environment that determines whether that coating applies and cures correctly. Airflow velocity and pattern, filtration efficiency, temperature uniformity, humidity control, lighting quality, contamination exclusion — these are booth variables, and they directly control finish quality. A spray gun performing flawlessly in a poorly designed booth will still produce a compromised finish. GFS exists to eliminate that variable.

GFS is a vertical manufacturer, which means they build most of what goes into their booths in-house: the lights, fans, motors, control panels, filters, and enclosures. That vertical integration is what makes custom and pre-engineered configurations possible without compromising quality or delivery, and it's why GFS can engineer a booth around a specific aircraft, railcar, or military vehicle rather than fitting the vehicle to a standard box.

The product line spans from the first booth to the most demanding:

Performer series — GFS's entry-level automotive refinish booth line, built for small and medium collision shops that need a reliable, code-compliant finishing environment with quality lighting, effective overspray capture, and contamination control without the feature set of the premium lines.
Ultra series (XS, XD, XR) — GFS's flagship automotive refinish booth line, in production since 1999. The Ultra XD features a patented Controlled Airflow Ceiling with full-width filtered plenum for even air distribution, available in downdraft or semi-downdraft configurations with programmable LOGIC control panels, SmartFlash capability, and economy modes that deliver up to 60% electricity savings and 75% fuel cost reduction. The Ultra XR integrates directly with the REVO Speed curing system for a combined spray-and-cure workflow. Booth widths from 14 to 30 feet cover everything from a standard passenger vehicle to a full-size pickup or commercial van.
Aircraft paint booths — custom-engineered for specific aircraft. GFS designs booths for military, commercial, and business aircraft of all sizes — from business jets and helicopters through large transport aircraft — with precision airflow, temperature and humidity control, and filtration specified to the aircraft type and the coating system being applied. The U.S. Air Force uses GFS booths for fighter jets and C-17 transport aircraft. Each installation is a custom engineering project, not a standard product.
Industrial and large-format booths — for heavy equipment, construction and agricultural machinery, rail cars, transit buses, marine vessels, and large-scale military and defense equipment. GFS pre-engineered and custom industrial booth configurations handle the widths, heights, and airflow requirements that standard automotive booths cannot accommodate, backed by an in-house team of electrical engineers, software developers, structural engineers, and airflow specialists.
REVO accelerated infrared curing systems — GFS's short wave electric infrared curing platform, available in Speed, Rapid, Spot, and Handheld models. REVO cures from the inside out — penetrating multiple coating layers to heat the substrate beneath rather than heating only the surface — which cuts cure time by hours without chemical accelerators. The REVO Speed targets one-to-four-panel jobs and speed-lane repair facilities; the Rapid reaches any part of a vehicle from prep area to open-front booth; the Spot targets primer and filler curing; the Handheld runs on a standard 110V outlet for spot repairs. Shops that have implemented REVO report 20 to 40 percent productivity increases.
AdvanceCure accelerated airflow system — an integrated booth option that uses controlled turbulent airflow to accelerate drying time for both waterborne and solvent-based basecoats, without additional heat infrastructure.
Prep stations, mixing rooms, and storage solutions — the supporting environment around the paint booth: prep decks and stations for sanding and priming, dedicated mixing rooms for paint preparation, and storage configurations that keep a finishing operation organized and compliant.

Why CET for GFS

CET is an authorized GFS distributor, and the GFS relationship completes something that no other single brand on our line card can: the spray booth itself. We sell the guns, the pumps, the fluid handling systems, and the curing equipment — GFS is the controlled environment all of it lives inside. A customer outfitting a new finishing operation can source the booth and all of the spray equipment through CET, which means one technical contact, one parts source, and one service relationship for the entire installation.

Booth and equipment system integration. Specifying the right booth airflow for the spray technology being used — whether that's HVLP, air-assisted airless, or electrostatic — requires understanding both sides of the system. CET's application engineers work across both the GFS booth specification and the spray equipment configuration, so the installation is designed as a complete system rather than two independently specified products.
Filters and replacement parts. GFS intake and exhaust filters, lighting components, and maintenance parts are stocked by CET for fast replenishment — because a paint booth running on degraded filters is a contamination problem, not just a maintenance item.
Custom and pre-engineered solutions. CET works with GFS's engineering team on booth specifications that don't fit a standard catalog configuration — unusual dimensions, specialized airflow requirements, specific compliance needs. GFS's vertical manufacturing gives CET and its customers genuine engineering flexibility, not just product selection.

From a single Performer booth for a new collision shop to a custom aircraft paint hangar for a military contractor — CET provides the GFS finishing environment and the spray equipment that goes inside it.