If you need emergency care, you look for qualified doctors with specialised equipment. So why not do the same for your car?
A car accident is every driver’s worst nightmare, even if there are no injuries involved. There’s the hassle of dealing with the aftermath, the inconvenience of being car-less during the repair period, and the gnawing thought that your car will never be the same again.
That last point, however, doesn’t have to apply. Headache needn’t be compounded by heartache if you choose the right accident repair centre. That means finding one with all the latest specialised equipment and the skilled hands to use it.
Peer inside the Cycle & Carriage Body & Paint Centre in Pandan Gardens, for example, and you’ll see exactly what we mean.
It’s not just a workshop, but is sort of like a well-run hospital for cars, complete with a clean admissions area where professional, sympathetic staff will help you to start the paperwork for any insurance claim, and guide you through it. The point of post-accident care is to take care of the driver as well as the car, after all.
Once the paperwork is done, the next steps are in the hands of the experts — and their special equipment. Here are five to look out for:
Collision Repair Bench — How can the gnarly, twisted metal of a car’s major subframes be straightened again? Hydraulic pressure is the answer! A larger workshop has the space for a repair rig that can use chains and a hydraulic jack to literally pull bent metal straight again. But a proper job isn’t left to the naked eye. A precise measurement system lets the operator measure fixed points on the car and compare them against reference points provided by the factory. That way, even if something is off by even a few millimetres, the right amount and direction of hydraulic tension can rectify it.
Miracle System — Yes, that’s what it’s actually called. A “miracle” repair system by a company called Powertec allows dents to be pulled out of bodywork and smoothened back down by master metal workers. It involves welding a line of keys to the bare metal and using them as hooking points to pull a dent out. Before, panel beaters had to access the metal somehow from behind the damage and hammer it outwards. With the Miracle System, lots of time-consuming and complicated disassembly can be avoided. Now you know why it’s called that.
Paint codes — Mixing paint can be a nightmare (just think of how many different shades of, say, white there are). This is so important to car repair that it is one way a person can tell straightaway if a car has been crashed before: mismatched body panel colours are a dead giveaway. But car manufacturers supply paint codes to authorised workshops, allowing them to mix up fresh paint that perfectly matches what is sprayed on at the factory.
Colour spectrometer — What if a car has had a colour change before its accident, or if some of its panels are sun-faded? In that situation, a freshly-repaired panel spray with factory-matching paint might stand out against the older bodywork. But the best workshops can use a colour spectrometer. It’s like a scanner that reads colours precisely. After taking a reading, the technician feeds its data to a computer, keys in how much surface area needs to be covered, and the system calculates the exact number of grams needed of each pigment to mix up the perfect amount of perfectly matching paint.
Spray booth — Clean, dust-free air in a well-lit setting are crucial to a good paint job, yet some smaller workshops do their spray painting outdoors. Why invite environmental contaminants onto what is supposed to be a pristine coat of paint? Always choose a workshop that has a proper paint booth instead.
BONUS: A library
Not a place for reading books as such, but a collection of factory manuals (either physical or, increasingly the case these days, digital). Factory manuals provide important information about repair steps and techniques, and cover the proper use of tools. They also give technicians crucial information: modern cars have high-strength steel in their bodywork in some places, for example. It’s extremely useful to know where. But an authorised workshop’s team would know all the key points and how to deal with them, whereas an outside shop might have to guess.
