Case Studies

None of these was chosen because it went well. Each was chosen because the finished job differed from the first sheet in a way that is instructive, which means the set is deliberately biased towards repairs that grew. A collection of jobs that came in on the original estimate would be more flattering and would teach an owner nothing, since the estimate that holds is not the one anybody needs help understanding.

That bias is the point rather than a caveat. Owners are not surprised by repairs that go to plan. They are surprised at day fourteen when a number moves, and the only useful preparation for that is having read several accounts of it happening for reasons that were mechanical rather than opportunistic.

Each study is structured as intake condition, findings at teardown, supplement history, hours and the price band it fell into. The instinct is to skip to the last two, and that is the least transferable part of the document. Your coach is not that coach, your carrier is not that carrier, and a band is a band precisely because the spread inside it is real.

The supplement history is the part that transfers. It shows what a first sheet could not see, how the finding was documented, and how long the carrier took to review it. An owner reading three of those in a row starts to recognise the pattern in their own repair, which is worth considerably more than a total that will not match theirs.

A case study is a sample of one and should be read as such. It cannot establish an average, cannot support a claim about how often something happens, and cannot be used to argue that your repair should cost what that repair cost. Six of them cannot either. Nothing on this page is a statistic, and no figure from any study is presented as one anywhere on this site.

What a single job can do is establish that a thing is possible and describe the mechanism. A travel trailer subfloor traced back to one slide seal is not a prediction about your trailer. It is a demonstration that a small seal failure can produce a large structural bill, which is the sort of knowledge that changes what an owner checks twice a year.

The write ups use trade vocabulary without stopping to define it, so two terms are worth having in hand. A supplement is a second estimate written after panels come off, priced against what teardown actually found, and on collision work it is normal rather than exceptional. Tolerance is the published dimensional range a manufacturer specifies for structure, and measuring against it is what separates a structural repair from a cosmetic one.

Everything else is defined on the glossary page, which exists mostly so pages like this one can be written in the language the trade actually uses. A term you cannot name is a line item you cannot argue about with an adjuster, and the studies here are also a reading exercise in that vocabulary.

Every study maps onto the day axis that runs through this site, and it is worth reading them with that structure in mind. The findings section belongs to day 1 to 3. Parts and structure belong to day 4 to 10, which is where a discontinued component blows through the top of a range. Refinish belongs to day 11 to 20, and the systems and calibration work at the end belongs to day 21 plus.

Reading them that way turns six anecdotes into one argument about sequencing. In every case the delay landed at a specific node, for a reason that node already warns about, and the studies exist partly to demonstrate that the axis was not written after the fact to excuse anything.