It means the smallest version of that job on a straightforward car, and roughly a third of our private work lands there. A door skin on a solid-colour saloon is not the same job as the same door on a three-stage pearl with a swage line through the damage, and we will say which one you have while the car is still on the ramp rather than discovering it on the Tuesday. When a quote comes in above the "from" figure, the reason sits next to the number in hours and materials. We have never raised a price mid-job without agreeing it first, and on the two occasions in twenty-eight years where we misjudged a car badly, we absorbed it.

If you are claiming, you pay your excess and nothing else — we do not ask clients to make up a shortfall between our estimate and an insurer’s schedule, and if you are ever asked that by any body shop, treat it as a warning. Where an insurer proposes to write a car off that we believe is properly repairable, we will say so in writing and put figures behind it, because a total loss on a well-kept car is frequently an economic decision rather than an engineering one. You are entitled to challenge it, and you are entitled to keep the car and have it repaired privately; we will tell you honestly whether we think that is a good idea.

Private work takes a third on ordering of materials and the balance on collection; there is no charge for storage while a car waits for parts. Restoration programmes are staged monthly against work completed, with photographs. If something is not right when you collect, do not accept the car — say so on the forecourt and it goes straight back in. That is not a complaints procedure, it is just how it works: everything is easier to correct before it leaves. After collection, the paint guarantee runs for as long as you own the car and the workmanship guarantee for three years.

Read the hours, not the total. Two estimates for the same wing can differ by four hundred pounds and be describing entirely different jobs — one blending into the door and the bonnet, the other stopping hard at the shut line. Check whether colour matching is itemised, whether the word blend appears at all, whether primer is listed, and whether there is a line for corrosion protection inside the panel where the weld went. If a figure is markedly lower, something on that list is missing, and it will be one of the layers nobody can see. We are happy to go through a rival estimate with you line by line, including on the occasions when the honest answer is that theirs is perfectly good and cheaper than ours.