Mobile SMART Repairs At Your Home or Workplace

A SMART repair works by treating only the damaged area of a panel rather than the whole panel. The technician washes and degreases the area first, because polish, tar and traffic film will contaminate anything sprayed over the top, then works out how deep the damage actually goes.

From there the area is flatted back through the clear coat and feathered out into sound paint so there is no hard edge. If the metal or plastic underneath is dented or split, that is rebuilt with filler or plastic welded before any paint goes near it. Then primer, a basecoat mixed to your vehicle paint code, and clear coat over the top, each coat cured before the next. The colour is blended out into the surrounding paint rather than stopped at a line, which is what makes the repair disappear.

What actually gets done depends entirely on the damage. A small dent where the paint is still intact is pushed out using paintless dent removal, with no filler and no paint at all. A cracked bumper needs plastic welding from behind before the face is filled and refinished. A stone chip on a bonnet may only need touching in and flat polishing.

Anything cosmetic and localised: scuffs, scrapes, scratches, chips, small dents and cracked plastics, on a single area of a panel. The rough test is whether the damage will fit comfortably inside the blend area the technician can create without running paint across a body line onto the next panel.

Beyond the paintwork itself, we also deal with the trim, the bumpers and the wheels, which is usually where a car looks tired first. Textured plastic trims that have faded to grey can be brought back to their original shade, and cracked trim can be repaired rather than replaced.

• Bumper scuffs, scrapes and corner damage
• Split and cracked bumpers, plastic welded then refinished
• Small dents and door dinks, often paintless
• Stone chips on bonnets, wings and roof edges
• Key scratches and vandal damage
• Kerbed and scuffed alloy wheels
• Faded, scratched or cracked textured plastic trims
• Surface rust caught early, before it eats through

Because a full panel respray is a much bigger job for the same visible result. The panel has to be stripped, prepared, sprayed and baked, the surrounding panels masked, and the car is off the road while it happens. On a bumper corner scuff the size of a hand, that is a lot of process for a small piece of damage.

There is also the paint itself. A localised repair leaves the rest of the factory finish on the car untouched. Respray a whole wing and every square inch of it is now aftermarket paint, which anyone inspecting the car before buying it will spot with a paint depth gauge.

The one thing a SMART repair depends on is the colour match, and that comes from the manufacturer paint code rather than guesswork. The code is mixed, sprayed onto a test card, checked against the panel in daylight and adjusted if the car has faded. If the colour will not sit right, blending it out into the surrounding paint is what carries the repair.

When the damage is bigger than the technique. A crease running the length of a door, damage that crosses a swage line onto the next panel, or a bumper that has been torn off its mountings is a conventional body shop job, and we will tell you that rather than take the booking.

Rust is the other one. Surface rust around a chip can be cured and repaired, but once it has gone through from the back of the panel there is nothing solid left to paint onto, and holes will appear whatever is put over the top. Rust work is not part of the mobile service in any case: it needs the body shop at Radcliffe.

Weather also decides some of it. Basecoat and lacquer will not flash off and cure properly in rain, damp or cold, and a repair sprayed in the wrong conditions will fail within months. If the forecast is against us we would rather move your booking than hand back work we know will not last.