Tips: Services You Can Expect from Collision Auto Body Repair Shops

The Help You Need After an Accident

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You may be the safest driver in your family; however, the other driver may not drive as safely as you. Hence, you can be in an auto accident for no fault of your own. Accidents keep happening. The first thing you need to do if you are in an unfortunate auto accident is to take stock of injuries if any and call for medical help if required. The next thing you’ll need to do is look for a collision auto body repair center in your neighborhood to have your car fixed.

Your car is insured; hence there can’t be any problem fixing the damages. However, it’s never as easy as that. The insurance provider may want you to get the repairs done at the designated auto body repair shop approved by them. The fact is you have the right to choose the repair center where you want your vehicle fixed. You don’t want a shoddy job done because it reduces your vehicle’s value. What makes things worse is that the car isn’t fixed yet.

Here are some services you can expect from a qualified collision shop in your neighborhood:

Looking Below the Surface

The damages are not usually superficial, affecting just the paint and outer body, which a tinkering and paint job can fix. There is a need to look below the surface because the accident’s impact can break or bend body panels, misalign the wheels and even cause damage to the drivetrain parts.

A qualified and experienced collision auto body repair team is like a team of specialist doctors–they know what to look for, where, in your car, and fix it like new. You never know; your vehicle may have to be stripped down completely to get an estimate.

All Shop Estimates Are Not the Same

It takes an experienced and highly skilled appraiser to size up damage, and more often than not, the repair estimates given by such experts match the actual repair cost. Whereas an inexperienced person may provide an estimate that is either too low or too high, both are of no use to you or the insurance provider.

It is likely that even as the repair work progresses, the technicians will detect minor damages, and they need to be fixed, too. Experienced appraisers know how to convince the insurers about how they missed such minor damages in the first place and that the repairs are justified.

Fixing Bent Panels is No Easy Task

Bent body panels are a challenge even for the most seasoned technicians. Fixing such bent panels is not limited to a few measured taps here and there to fix them.  A set of sophisticated tools are used to correct such dents, and the technicians working on the dent take great care to ensure the panel gets back its original shape. You cannot entrust such jobs to inexperienced people who don’t know how to fix them.

Writing Off Your Car

If you’ve been in a harsh accident, your car may be “totaled” or considered a “total loss” that’s beyond repair. It is wiser to write-off your vehicle (that’s what the insurance provider would do).

The car is considered beyond repair or irreparable not because the collision auto body repair can’t put it back together. The car is written-off because the repair cost estimates are higher than the vehicle’s value. While old cars can be written off quickly, a new car has to be certified as nearly irreparable to get this classification.

Fender and Dent Repairs

The most common repairs in an accident car have to do with fender and dent repairs. A fender appears to be all-metal at a cursory glance. However, it takes an expert team to check for the presence of other materials like aluminum or other composite materials, each with a unique composition and characteristic.

Dents are not just trivial repairs that the experts can pass to the junior technicians. It takes a skilled technician to fix even the smallest dents such that they don’t appear to the naked eye. Your car must look as good as new after a fender or dent job. A dent or fender repair job is never complete without a paint job. Tiny scratches and rock chips need to be fixed lest they become the starting points for rust-formation.

Summing It Up

Car crashes keep happening every day, and it is sheer bad luck if you’ve been unfortunate enough to have been in one. It is challenging to coordinate between the insurance providers and the collision repair center to get your vehicle back on the roads. However, with the assistance of a collision auto body repair team, you can get your car back on roads safely in no time.