Warranty
Short, specific, and different for each kind of work, because a dent, a bumper cover, a wheel and a headlight lens fail in four completely different ways and one paragraph covering all of them would be a paragraph covering none of them.
For as long as you own the vehicle. A dent worked out properly does not come back. There is no filler curing under there, nothing shrinking, nothing to lift — the metal has been moved back to where it started and the factory finish over it was never disturbed. If a panel we repaired ever shows that dent again, we come back and it costs nothing.
What that does not cover is the same panel getting hit again. A previously repaired area is not weaker, but it is also not immune, and a new dent in the same spot is a new dent. We will tell you honestly which one we are looking at, and the shape usually answers it before either of us has to argue.
Twelve months against the finish failing. Peeling, lifting, flaking, cracking or clouding of what we sprayed. Those are adhesion and material faults, they are ours, and they show up inside a year if they are going to.
It does not cover the cover being scraped again, which is not a defect, it is a parking lot. It also does not cover a repair that has since been polished with a compound aggressive enough to cut through fresh clear, or that has been through a brush wash inside the first forty-eight hours — fresh material is still hardening for days after it looks dry, and a spinning bristle will find that out.
Twelve months against the finish lifting or corroding at the repair. If the filler edge telegraphs through, or the coating lifts off the repaired lip, that is a preparation fault and we redo it.
It does not cover curbing it again, and it never covers anything structural, because we never did anything structural. A cosmetic wheel repair is a finish. If a rim we refinished later turns out to be bent or cracked, that is not a warranty matter for the finish — it is a wheel to take off the car. We check for both before we start precisely so that this conversation does not happen later.
Twelve months against the new UV coating failing. If it hazes, peels or yellows inside the year, we come back and redo it.
Be aware of what you are buying. The bar for this job is genuinely low across the trade — a great many restorations are a machine polish and a wipe of sealant, they look excellent for a fortnight, and in Florida they are chalky again before the next summer. The lens is not what fails; the factory UV hard coat on top of it is. So the coat comes off completely and a new UV clear goes on, and that is why it takes an hour and not fifteen minutes. If somebody has already sanded your lenses and left them uncoated, say so — they will be worse than untouched and it changes the job.
Twelve months against the bond letting go, provided nothing has been pressure washed along the edge and no dressing has been worked underneath it. Adhesive tape is a chemical bond to a clean surface, and a jet of water at close range under an edge will break it as surely as a screwdriver.
Somebody else has worked over ours
Touch-up over a bumper repair, a compound cut through fresh clear, a second shop sanding a wheel we refinished. Once another set of hands is in it we cannot tell whose fault the failure is, and neither can anybody else.
New damage in the same place
A fresh dent, a fresh curb, a fresh scrape. We will look at it and be straight with you about which it is, and in most cases the shape of the damage settles the question on its own.
A repair we told you would not be perfect
If a difficult dent was quoted as an eighty per cent result and it came back eighty per cent, that is the job we described and the job you agreed to. That is exactly why it is written on the estimate before the van moves rather than explained at the curb afterwards.
Call (656) 236-2374, send a photograph of the panel, and mention the job number if you still have the work order. Inside the twenty-five mile ring a warranty visit is free, including the trip. Outside it, the repair is still free and the trip charge for your ring still applies, which we would rather state plainly here than discover together on the phone.