Careers

A technician arriving from automotive collision work brings most of the hand skills and almost none of the reference material. On a car there is a published procedure for where to section a rail and what adhesive to use. On a coach there is a bonded sandwich that was never designed to come apart, no sectioning procedure, and a decision about where the repair boundary goes that has to be made by the person holding the cutting tool.

That is the real difference and it is why the apprenticeship here is longer than in a car shop. The first year is mostly learning what not to cut: how far a broken bond travels past a paint mark, which fasteners are structural and which are trim, why a coach flexes and what that does to a repair that was made rigid. There is no fast route through that and nobody here will pretend there is one.

Applications are considered against a role rather than against a general opening, because the skills are not interchangeable across the floor. An excellent refinish technician is not a systems technician who happens to be busy.

• Structural and frame: measurement discipline, and a welding certification for anything on a load path
• Laminate and body: layup, bonding, delamination boundary work, and aluminium skin on vintage coaches
• Refinish: colour judgement on the panel across gelcoat, laminate, aluminium and decal beds
• Systems: 12 volt and 120 volt, inverters, generators, LP with certification, plumbing and appliances
• Interior: joinery that survives road vibration and a wide temperature swing
• Estimating: writing a first sheet and a supplement that a carrier will read as one document

Describe what you have had your hands in rather than what you have been certified to do. A technician who can say where a delamination stopped on the last sidewall they opened, and how they found the edge, is more convincing than a list of courses. Where a real certification exists and applies, it counts and it will be asked about: welding on structure, LP handling, refrigerant recovery under the shop EPA number.

Two habits matter more than they sound. The first is documentation. Every repair order here is photographed at intake, at teardown and before delivery, and a technician who treats that as paperwork rather than as part of the job creates a file that will lose a supplement. The second is being willing to be measured. Structural work is checked against published tolerance, and refinish is checked in two lights by somebody who did not spray it.

The rates on this site are public, which means an applicant can read the shop the same way a customer does. Body and paint is posted at $210 per hour. Mechanical and electrical is posted at $260. Diagnostics, scan and programming is $285 with a one hour minimum. Detail is $95.

A collision shop where systems labour bills above body labour is telling you something about supply. RV systems work sits at the intersection of low voltage, household voltage, gas, water and appliances, and very few technicians are competent across all five, so the rate reflects scarcity rather than difficulty alone. Diagnostics is billed above both because finding a fault on a coach is routinely harder than repairing it, and because that hour is credited against an authorised repair, which means the shop is paid for the search only when the search does not become a job.

It is physical and it is often uncomfortable. Roof work happens from scaffold in direct sun on an inland afternoon. Underbody and chassis work happens on your back on a slab. Sanding laminate is dusty in a way that automotive filler work is not, and interior demolition on a water damaged coach is genuinely unpleasant work that somebody has to do carefully rather than quickly.

The pace is also uneven by nature. A coach waiting on a moulded cap does not generate hours, and the schedule has to be filled around it, which means the work is varied but not always the work you were in the middle of. Owners are frequently anxious about money when they walk in, and a technician here will be part of conversations about a repair that costs more than somebody planned for. None of that is a reason not to do the job. All of it is better known in advance.

The work is rarely repetitive. No two coaches are damaged the same way, most jobs involve deciding rather than following a procedure, and the problem solving is real. A technician who can fabricate a part that no longer exists in production, and make it fit and hold, has a skill that does not commoditise and does not get replaced by a database.

The building supports that rather than fighting it. Structure, laminate, refinish, systems and interior all sit under one roof, so a technician sees the whole repair rather than a slice of it arriving from another vendor and leaving for a third. Over a few years that is how somebody becomes genuinely useful on a coach, and it is not a thing a car shop can offer at any rate of pay.

Applications come in by email to the shop and are read by somebody who does the work rather than routed through a portal. There is no seasonal recruitment cycle and no formal opening list, because a specialty shop hires when a specific capability is short. A message that names the role and describes two or three jobs you have finished is read carefully. A generic application to a general address is not.

Apprentices are considered alongside experienced technicians, and on laminate and body work in particular an apprentice with good hands and no automotive habits sometimes learns faster than a twenty year collision technician. No benefits, pay bands or start dates are published on this site, because publishing a figure that has not been set would be inventing one, and every other number on these pages is real.