Vehicle Body Repairs in Rochdale

Twenty minutes on the A58, traffic permitting, which is why Rochdale, Heywood and Middleton absorb most of our short notice work. If a booking moves or a job finishes early, these are the addresses we ring first, so it is worth asking about the same day even if you only spotted the damage this morning.

What decides it is daylight and weather rather than distance. A repair needs two to four hours from first sanding to cured lacquer, and paint will not flash off correctly in rain or near freezing air. In practice that makes a summer afternoon call feasible and a wet January one a next day job.

• Rochdale town centre, OL11 and OL16
• Heywood and the A58 corridor
• Middleton driveways and car parks
• Littleborough and the OL15 valley
• Workplace parking near the M62

Bumpers, then doors. A plastic bumper takes the first hit in almost every low speed incident, and it repairs well because the material can be welded from behind, filled and reprofiled at the front, then sprayed with a flexible primer under the colour so the paint moves with the plastic instead of splitting in the cold.

Doors come second, and the split there is between paint intact and paint broken. A trolley dent with unbroken paint goes out with paintless dent removal, worked from behind with rods, keeping the original factory finish on the car. A crease with cracked paint, or a dent sitting on a body line, cannot, and that area is filled, primed, sprayed and blended instead.

Cosmetic damage to the outside of the car that has not gone through or distorted the structure of the panel. That covers dents and creases, scratches from light marks to deep key damage, scuffs and scrapes along wings and doors, stone chips on bonnets and front panels, cracked or kerbed bumpers, faded and split plastic trim, and rust that has started around a chip or an old repair.

It does not cover accident damage. If a panel is torn, an impact has pushed the shell out of alignment, or something behind the panel has been damaged, that belongs at a full accident repair centre and we will tell you so rather than hide it under filler and paint.

Most of what we see is small damage that has simply been left. One chip on a bonnet is nothing. Thirty of them, plus a scuffed bumper corner and a dented rear door, is what makes a five year old car look ten.

• Dents, dings and creases in any panel
• Scratches and scuffs, superficial through to bare metal
• Stone chips on bonnets, wings and door edges
• Cracked, scuffed and dented plastic bumpers
• Key scratches and other vandal damage
• Faded, scuffed or cracked textured plastic trim
• Surface rust, cut back and repainted at the body shop

Rochdale is nine miles from the Radcliffe body shop, straight along the A58, which puts it among the handful of towns we can reach at short notice. Heywood and Middleton sit on the same road, so all three often go on one visit.

We work throughout Rochdale and the OL11, OL12, OL15, OL16 postcode areas, typically 20 minutes from the body shop at Radcliffe, M26 4AD. That includes Rochdale town centre, Heywood, Middleton and Littleborough.