Mobile SMART Repairs in Bradford

By photograph first. Send a close up of the damage and a wider shot of the whole panel with your BD postcode, and a fixed, no obligation price comes back within 24 hours along with a straight answer on whether the job can be done mobile. Only then do we set a date, which keeps the West Yorkshire runs tight and stops anyone waiting in for a van that cannot help.

Because Bradford is a planned trip rather than a local hop, a few days notice makes a difference. Two or three jobs across the city and the Aire Valley are normally grouped into one day, so there is usually a date inside the week rather than a wait of several.

• Bradford city centre and the BD1 to BD5 streets
• Shipley and Saltaire
• Bingley and the Aire Valley
• Residential roads across BD8, BD9 and BD15
• Workplace car parks and business units around BD18

On a driveway, in a private yard or in a workplace car park, as long as there is room to open the car up and stand alongside the panel for a couple of hours. Terraced streets in the inner BD postcodes are the awkward ones: on street parking with no driveway leaves the technician working next to moving traffic, which is neither safe nor good for the paint.

If that describes your street there are two ways round it. Either the car comes to a workplace car park for the appointment, or it comes over to the Radcliffe body shop, which is open until 20:00 on weekdays and to 16:00 on Saturdays. Say where the car will be parked when you send the photographs and we will tell you straight away whether it works.

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.

Bradford is 36 miles and about 50 minutes from the Radcliffe body shop, covered on the same West Yorkshire route as Halifax and Leeds. The day usually runs from the city centre up the Aire Valley through Shipley and Saltaire.

We work throughout Bradford and the BD1, BD2, BD3, BD4 postcode areas, typically 50 minutes from the body shop at Radcliffe, M26 4AD. That includes Bradford city centre, Shipley, Saltaire and Bingley.