Mobile SMART Repairs in Blackburn

Anywhere the van can park safely next to the car with a bit of room around it. Most Blackburn work happens on a driveway at home, though a fair share is done in workplace car parks along the A666 corridor while people are at their desks. A level surface, access to the panel and somewhere out of the wind is all the technician needs.

Weather has more of a say than location. Basecoat and lacquer will not flash off properly in rain or cold, and the higher ground around Darwen turns first in autumn. If the forecast will not hold for the couple of hours a repair needs, we would rather move the booking than hand back paint that lifts within months.

• Blackburn town centre and the BB1 streets
• Darwen and the roads climbing onto the moor
• Great Harwood and Rishton
• Workplace car parks along the A666
• Dealer and trade work across BB3 and BB6

Rust is the main one. Surface corrosion around a stone chip can be cured and repaired, but once it has come through from behind the panel there is nothing solid left to paint onto, and rust work is not part of the mobile service in any case. Anything structural, or damage running across a swage line onto the next panel, is a workshop job as well.

For those we collect from Blackburn and deliver back at no charge, which usually beats losing the driveway for two days. The workshop is open Monday to Friday from 09:00 to 20:00 and Saturday from 09:00 to 16:00, so dropping a car in around work is straightforward if you would rather bring it yourself.

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.

Blackburn is a 35 minute run from Radcliffe, 17 miles up the A666, so the van arrives with the working day still ahead of it. Darwen, Great Harwood and Rishton are covered on the same trip.

We work throughout Blackburn and the BB1, BB2, BB3, BB6 postcode areas, typically 35 minutes from the body shop at Radcliffe, M26 4AD. That includes Blackburn town centre, Darwen, Great Harwood and Rishton.