The queue
Eight job types, and between them they cover most of what happens to a car in a parking lot. What they have in common is that none of them need a paint booth, a lift or a week of your car’s time — which is the only reason a van can do them properly at all.
Round or soft dents with the finish unbroken. Read on a line board, worked from behind with rods, sometimes pulled from the face with glue tabs and tapped flat. No filler, no paint, and the factory finish stays on the car.
One or two dings in a door from the car next to you. Quick, usually complete, and the price drops sharply for the second and third on the same panel.
Dozens or hundreds of shallow dents across the horizontal panels. Priced by panel and severity band. Needs a garage, a covered bay or the canopy, because a hundred shallow dents cannot be read in direct sun.
Scraped and gouged plastic covers. Sanded back, filled where the plastic is torn, adhesion promoter, color and clear with a flex additive. Blended into a corner where blending will hold up.
Curb rash on the outer lip and barrel: sanded, filled, re-cut, refinished on the car. Runout and crack check first, every time, and that check is allowed to end the job.
Hazed, yellowed lenses. The failed UV hard coat is sanded off entirely and a new UV clear laid on, because a polish alone is back inside a Florida summer.
Lifted body-side moldings, wheel arch cladding, roof rails and emblems re-bonded on fresh acrylic foam tape with the surface properly stripped and the one-use clips renewed.
Vans, trucks and pool cars done in your yard in one visit, with a written line per unit, one summary invoice, and a plain recommendation on which units to leave alone.
There is no booth on a van and there never will be, so a full panel respray is not ours. Neither is structural or collision work, glass, mechanical repair, alignment, or anything that needs the car on a lift. If a bumper cover has snapped its mounting tabs, that is a replacement cover and a shop; if a quarter panel is folded, that is a frame bench.
We say this on the services page rather than at the curb because the wasted trip is the expensive part for both of us. Send photographs first and one of two things happens: a written price, or a straight answer that you need somebody else and roughly what they will be doing.
Priced from photographs, before the van moves
Every line on the estimate is set before anybody drives out, and it is the line that ends up on the work order. The trade’s oldest trick is the low number on the phone and the rediscovery at the curb, when your car is already apart and you are already late for something. We would rather lose the job at the photograph stage.
Size, location, count — in that order
A dent is priced on how big it is, where on the panel it sits, and how many others are with it. Location does more work than people expect: a dent in the open middle of a door is a straightforward push, and the identical dent sitting on the swage line — the sharp crease running the length of the panel — can take three times as long, because the metal there is already worked hard from the press and it fights back.
The second one is cheaper than the first
Most of the cost of a small dent is getting to the back of it: the trim off, the light out, the card unclipped, the panel lit. Once the door is open and the light is set, the next ding on that same panel costs a fraction of the first. This is why it is worth pointing out everything on the car when you send the photographs, and not just the one that is annoying you.
Four cases, drawn. These are the ones where the honest answer is that we should not take your money, and the drawings are here so you can see what we are talking about before anybody drives anywhere.
The paint decides, not the metal. A break in the finish over the dent means pushing it makes the next repair bigger than the one you called about.
A round dent is displaced metal and it comes back. A crease is stretched metal, and stretched steel is longer than the space it has to sit in.
The rod works from the back. Braced, bonded, double-skinned or foam-filled panels can leave no route in that does not mean drilling, and that is a no.
Refinishing a curbed lip is a finish job. A rim that is out of round or cracked is a safety item, and it does not get filled, painted and handed back tidy.
The paint is cracked, chipped or already touched up
Paintless dent repair works while the finish is intact. It is the paint that decides, not the metal. If the clear coat is split over the dent, or somebody has put a brush of touch-up in it, pushing the panel back stretches that break wide open — and the panel then needs refinishing, which it did not need before we touched it. We check that first, on photographs, before the van is committed to the drive.
Sharp creases and stretched metal
A soft, round dent has displaced metal and it will come back. A sharp crease has stretched it, and stretched steel is longer than it was — there is more panel than there is space for it. Worked hard enough a crease will flatten, but there will be a line where it was, and in the wrong light you will see that line for as long as you own the car. We would rather send you to a body shop than take your money for a result you are going to be looking at every morning.
We cannot get behind it
Paintless repair is done from the back of the panel with a rod, so there has to be a way in — a window channel, a tail light aperture, a trim panel that comes off. Plenty of modern panels are braced, foam-filled, double-skinned or bonded, and some of them cannot be reached without drilling an access hole or pulling out structure. We will tell you which one yours is before we quote it, and if the only way in is a hole we are not happy with, that is a no.
A bent or cracked rim is not a cosmetic repair — ever
Repairing curb rash means sanding, filling and refinishing the cosmetic outer lip. That is a finish job. A rim that is bent out of round, or cracked, is a structural and a safety item, and it does not get filled, painted and handed back looking tidy. We check every wheel for runout and for cracks before we quote it, and a cracked one goes to a wheel specialist or in the bin. There is no version of this where we cover it up.
A real site carries the company's own photographs in those frames — the vans, the techs, the panels — and each one is captioned with the picture that belongs in it. None have been generated for this demonstration. There is no before-and-after frame here and there is not going to be one: in this trade that pair is the result, so an invented one would be a fabricated repair rather than a placeholder.