Mobile SMART Repairs in Chester

Parking, in almost every case. High kerbs beside narrow lanes catch alloy rims and bumper corners at low speed, and the older car parks inside the walls leave very little margin between a pillar and a front wing. Damage of that kind is shallow, localised and nearly always repairable without touching the rest of the panel.

Away from the centre the pattern changes. Handbridge, Hoole and Upton bring more of the everyday driveway damage: door dinks, trolley marks, scratches down a wing, faded plastic trim and stone chips picked up on the faster roads out of the city.

• Bumper corners scraped in walled city car parks
• Kerbed alloy wheels on the narrow lanes near the Rows
• Door dinks and trolley damage across CH1 and CH2
• Scratches and chips on cars parked on street in Hoole
• Faded mirror caps and textured trim in Handbridge and Upton

Send photographs first. One close up of the damage, one of the whole panel, and your CH postcode. A free, no obligation price comes back within 24 hours, and with it a straight answer on whether the repair can be done where the car is parked or whether it needs the body shop.

Because Chester is an hour out, dates are set rather than improvised, usually grouping two or three jobs across the city and the surrounding area into a single day. A few days notice normally secures a slot. Parking matters more here than in most places: a driveway, a private courtyard or a workplace car park works, an on street bay on a busy lane does not.

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.

Chester is 45 miles and roughly an hour from the Radcliffe body shop, so it is planned in alongside other Cheshire and Wirral work rather than visited at short notice. Tight historic streets and walled car parks account for most of what we repair there.

We work throughout Chester and the CH1, CH2, CH3, CH4 postcode areas, typically 60 minutes from the body shop at Radcliffe, M26 4AD. That includes the Chester Rows, Handbridge, Hoole and Upton.