Collision Repair, in detail

The common damage on a coach is not a highway crash. It is a parking structure clip, where the driver read the clearance bar and forgot the roof air conditioner shroud, or misjudged a pillar and dragged the sidewall from the entry door back to the rear wheel. The paint mark looks like a scuff. Underneath, the impact walked along a run of sidewall studs and broke the bond between skin and substrate for a distance well past where the scuff ends.

A low clearance strike on a Class A front cap presents as a cracked upper cap and a chipped windshield edge. What it also did, invisibly, was load the cap mounting flange and the front roof structure, and neither shows until the cap comes off. Fifth wheel damage from a jackknife is the reverse: the visible mark on the front cap is small, and the pin box area under it absorbed the whole load through a very short lever arm.

Tell us the noise. An owner who says the coach made a hollow bang and has rattled over bumps ever since has told us more than the photographs did, because that rattle is a fastener or a bracket that let go somewhere nobody has looked yet. The same goes for a door that stopped latching cleanly afterwards, or a slide that suddenly needs a shove on one corner. Those are structural symptoms reported as annoyances, and they are the cheapest diagnostic information available on the whole job.

• Air conditioner shroud struck at a clearance bar, sidewall untouched, roof structure loaded
• Sidewall drag from a pillar, bond broken well beyond the paint mark
• Class A front cap strike, cap flange and windshield opening both suspect
• Fifth wheel jackknife, small cap mark, pin box area carrying the load
• Rear cap impact pushing ladder and bumper mounts into the wall behind them

Minor is a scope word rather than a size word. It means the damage stopped at the skin: no structure moved, no seam opened, nothing behind the panel has to come apart. A clipped rear corner on a travel trailer, a scraped compartment door, a cracked cap corner, a mirror housing torn off with a piece of fiberglass behind it. This is the bottom of the band, four to twelve hours of body labour plus refinish, and the coach is usually here under a week.

The one thing that reliably pushes a minor job up is colour. A single stage white sidewall is straightforward. A coach with a three colour swept graphic running through the repair area means that graphic gets recreated by hand or a decal set gets sourced, and for a discontinued model no decal run exists. At that point the cheap option is often the right option: refinish the panel plain and delete the swirl. Some owners prefer that outcome and some refuse it. We price both and let you choose.

Major means structure moved. On a motorhome that is a cap flange, a run of sidewall studs, a roof bow, a floor outrigger or a chassis rail. On a trailer it is the A frame, a cross member or the wall to floor joint. The job stops being body work and becomes a rebuild: measure, pull or replace structure, verify tolerance, then rebuild outward and refinish. Hours run from twenty into the hundreds and there is no useful average to quote.

Parts drive the calendar harder than labour does. A moulded front cap for a current production coach is a multi week lead item and ships on a dedicated truck, because it cannot be crated small. A sidewall skin arrives as Filon sheet that has to be laid up and bonded here, which is shop time rather than waiting time. So structural work gets scheduled into the wait: the bench and the laminating area stay busy while the cap is somewhere on a highway.

• Cap mounting flange straightened, or the cap replaced outright where the flange is torn
• Sidewall studs sistered or replaced before any new skin is bonded on
• Roof bow and floor outrigger checked with the interior panel down, not through a hatch
• Windshield opening measured before glass gets ordered rather than after it arrives

Some coaches arrive at the point where a carrier is choosing between a total loss and a repair, and the owner wants it repaired anyway. A rolled Class A. A rear impact that pushed the bedroom wall forward. A fire adjacent loss with heat damage running the length of one side. This is the top of the band and it is a rebuild in the literal sense: stripped to structure, measured, rebuilt, reskinned, refinished, and every system it lost put back.

Owners choose this for two reasons and both are legitimate. A high end diesel pusher with a rebuilt interior can be worth more repaired than the settlement being offered. Or the coach is a discontinued model the owner has no intention of replacing. What we will say plainly is that on a mass produced travel trailer this arithmetic almost never works, and if you ask us we will tell you to take the settlement. Talking an owner into a rebuild that costs more than the vehicle is worth is not a service.

A restoration this size is never one authorisation either. It runs as staged scopes with a supplement at each stage, because nobody, including us, can see the whole job from outside on day zero. Structure gets authorised, measured and completed before skin is scoped, and skin is completed before refinish hours are written. Owners who want a single final figure at the start are asking for a number that would have to be padded to be safe, and a padded number helps nobody in a claim negotiation.

A supplement is a second estimate written after panels come off, and on collision work it is normal rather than exceptional. The first estimate covers what is visible. Teardown shows what the impact did behind the skin: a cracked laminate flange, a wet stud, a bent bracket, a seam that opened. All of it gets photographed with a scale reference in frame, and the carrier receives the set alongside the revised sheet.

This is also the step that adds calendar days, because a supplement is a second negotiation on a claim the carrier believed was settled. It changes their exposure rather than yours, unless the newly found work sits outside what the policy covers. Pre existing water damage is the usual example: an impact did not cause a rotted subfloor, and no carrier pays to replace one. Those two things get separated on the sheet so you can see which is which and decide about the uncovered part on its own merits.

Nothing gets cut or ordered before authorisation. On customer pay work a 50 percent deposit applies at authorisation on any job over $2,000, with a further 25 percent when parts arrive on jobs over $10,000. Special order parts carry a 100 percent deposit at the time of order and it is not refundable, because the part becomes yours the moment the supplier ships it.

The balance falls due at pickup and no vehicle leaves the property unpaid. Labour is not taxed. Sales tax of 7.75 percent applies to parts and materials. Body supplies calculate at $5 per body hour and paint supplies at $55 per paint hour, both automatically off the hours written rather than as a lump sum somebody guessed at. A 3.5 percent surcharge applies to card payments over $1,000, which passes the merchant fee straight through on high ticket work.

A Sprinter based Class B struck in the same place as a Class A is a different repair, because the Sprinter is a welded shell with structural panels behind the trim and the Class A is a laminated box sitting on a ladder chassis. On the van the damage runs into a structural member that gets sectioned at a manufacturer specified seam. On the coach it runs into a bonded sandwich that has to be taken apart deliberately and rebuilt in layers.

Commercial bodies add a third pattern. A box truck hit at the rear corner usually needs the corner post, a section of aluminium or composite skin, and the roll up door track checked for square, and the owner needs it earning again in days rather than weeks. Those get scheduled tighter and we say so up front, because a body shop that treats a working box truck like a hobby coach costs its owner more in downtime than in repair.