Stone Chip Repairs in Rochdale

More often than most places on our list. Nine miles and twenty minutes means a Rochdale booking does not eat a morning of travel, so gaps caused by cancellations elsewhere can genuinely be offered to you the same week. Ring in the morning and we will tell you straight whether that day is realistic.

The limit is not distance but weather. Basecoat and lacquer need dry conditions above freezing, and no amount of proximity changes that. If the forecast is wrong for spraying we will move the appointment rather than hand back a repair that lifts in six months. For jobs that cannot wait on the weather, the body shop is twenty minutes away with free collection and delivery.

• OL11 and OL16, the town centre and south side
• OL12 north of the town
• OL15 and Littleborough
• Heywood and Middleton
• Workplace visits across the borough
• Free collection to the Radcliffe body shop

Heywood and Middleton send us a steady stream, largely because both sit close to the motorway network and the cars there rack up commuting miles. Littleborough is different again, with damage that owes more to moorland grit and narrow lanes than to seventy mile an hour stone strikes. The town centre itself brings a mix of both, plus car park door edge chips.

The repair is the same whichever it is, but the urgency differs. Chips picked up at motorway speed tend to be deeper and more likely to have reached bare steel, which is what starts rust. Shallow lacquer chips from a lane or a car park can wait for better weather. We will tell you which yours are when we look at the photos.

Stone chips are caused by loose gravel, grit and road debris flicked up by the tyres of the vehicle in front of you. The faster the traffic, the harder the stone hits, which is why motorway and dual carriageway driving does far more damage than town miles.

Winter makes it worse. Gritters put down salt and sharp grit, and both get thrown around by every vehicle on the road. Water then works into the chip, freezes, expands and lifts the paint edges away from the metal. That is why a chip you noticed in October is often three times the size by March.

Certain parts of the car take nearly all of it, because they face forward and sit low.

• Leading edge of the bonnet and the top of the front wings
• Front bumper, grille surround and lower valance
• Wing mirror caps and A pillars
• Windscreen surround and the front edge of the roof
• Lower doors and sills, behind the front wheels
• Door edges and shuts, chipped in car parks rather than on the road

Rochdale is nine miles from Radcliffe straight along the A58, about twenty minutes, which makes it one of the few places we can often reach at short notice. Littleborough and the higher OL15 addresses are the ones most affected by winter weather.

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.