Aluminium is not steel that happens to be lighter. It work-hardens, it cannot be heat-shrunk the same way, it needs its own rivets, its own adhesives and its own tooling, and its dust must never meet steel dust in the same extraction system or you have built a galvanic corrosion cell inside somebody’s sill. We certified on it in 2016 and built a separate bench for it, which is why we take these jobs when several shops within ten miles send them on. Every structural repair leaves with a printed measurement report against manufacturer data — before figures, after figures and tolerance.

Bare-metal respraying for cars that deserve it, which in practice means stripping to clean steel, dealing honestly with whatever is underneath, setting every panel gap before a drop of colour is mixed, and then painting. These are long jobs — three months is normal, five is not unusual — and the estimate is a range with the reasons written next to it, because nobody can see through a wing until it is stripped. You get a photograph every Friday whether or not anything visible has happened, which is often the week the most important work was done.

Small and medium area repair for bumper scuffs, kerbed alloys and the trolley mark in a door. Localised, blended, and done in a day. It is the least profitable work on this list and we keep it because it is how most people meet us, and because a good SMART repair on a lease return saves the client several hundred pounds at inspection. We will say plainly when a scuff is deep enough that a proper panel refinish is the honest answer instead.

Mechanical servicing and MOT work: we are a body and paint shop, and a workshop that claims to do everything is telling you something about its depth. And "cosmetic-only" repairs to structural damage — where a car has taken a hit that has moved something, and the request is to make it look right without putting it right. We will not do that at any price, because the next person to find out is whoever is sitting in it when it is hit again. In both cases we will give you the name of somebody nearby we would use ourselves.

A great deal of body repair in this country is quietly subcontracted: the paint goes to one unit, the structural work to another, the polishing to a mobile operator in the car park. It is efficient, and it is how a shop takes on more cars than it can actually touch. The cost is that nobody owns the result — when a blend turns visible in September, nobody can say whose hands were on it in June. Every stage of every car here happens on this site, done by the four people named on the workshop page, which is a commercial disadvantage we accept because it is the only arrangement in which a guarantee means anything. It also means we can take only a certain number of cars a month, and when we are full we say so rather than book you in and let the car sit on the yard.