A Repair and a Half?
If you come to us for a smart repair, you may sometimes be told that you need a repair and a half -- what is this all about?
Because of the way Smart Repair works, we paint areas. As a general rule of thumb we talk about areas of damage which are about the size of a rugby ball. If your damage covers an area much bigger than a rugby ball, we count it as a repair and a half.
But there is another reason for a repair and a half...
You can see on the photo above that this bumper is made up of more than one panel. The main bumper (panel 1) and an insert (panel 2), this extra panel appear to serve no actual purpose and is just a feature to enhance the car's appearance.
You might think that because the extra panel is just a feature, all part of the same bumper, and it's the same colour in this case, we can do it as one repair -- especially as its the same damage across the area. But unfortunately not, we can't just paint right across it because if we did the gap between the two panels would fill with paint and it would look dreadful!
We have two options, one would be to dismantle the bumper and take the extra panel out to paint it, which is what we often do... however, as this is just a feature, sometimes it won't come apart without breaking the clips that hold them on.
So the other way is to paint the two areas separately. In this case we would mask panel 2 and paint panel 1, then once the paint was fully dried, we would mask panel 1 and paint panel 2. Obviously, the paint has to be plenty dry if we are going to stick masking tape to it, so this kind or repair takes a lot longer than a normal repair on a single panel.
Effectively, it's two smart repairs -- but we won't charge you twice. Instead we charge 1½ times the normal price.
However, there is another alternative which was to smart repair panel 1, and cosmetic repair panel 2. We made this recommendation on the car pictured above, because the damage here was slight, and on this particular car, a few touch-ins on the bumper would be expected and wouldn't significantly devalue the car.
