Out of Body Shop Experience

So, ask the body shop if they have a paint booth on premises. How new is it? Is it airtight? (You want to make sure all the dust particles and specks flying through the air from the surrounding frenzied activities don't find their way into said booth and ultimately into your paint. It's happened more than once.) Does the shop have sufficient tooling and is the staff trained to work on your specific vehicle? And with respect to your make and model, another appropriate question is: Does the shop use genuine factory (OE, or original equipment) replacement parts or some other kind of brand? Check out the office. Is it a mess, or is there a nice customer service area, or at least care taken in keeping the bathroom clean? In other words, do they care about you, the customer, or are you just a number to them (albeit a profitable one, depending on the insurance company)? Is it painfully obvious they don't care about customer retention? After all, there will be a bunch of new people coming in the door tomorrow.

The Repair Process
Repairing a car and smoothing out the sheetmetal is both an art form and a technical skill. As many people will note, you can plug up a hole or cover a crumpled panel with a bit of bondo, a sander and a quick spray, and the untrained eye may never see anything amiss. Bondo is for many a body shop the magic putty and is, in fact, a brand name and trademark of the Bondo Corporation. However, like the names "Kleenex," "Xerox," and "FedEx," it has entered our lexicon as a generic term used to refer to all auto-repair fillers or the action of such labor (as in "just bondo that quarter panel").


People, one body shop owner states, have a "misconception about bondo." Previous generations of the filler, when generously coated over the damaged area, had a tendency to crack and in more serious cases, fall off. That's not the case in today's modern body shop. Technology, competition and the Bureau of Automotive Repair have all contributed to improvements and advancements in the marketplace, and bondo, produced by a number of companies, has steadily improved in quality.

About Bondo
Obviously, there is a place and a purpose for bondo, and it is all about the application and the extent of the damage. It should not become a replacement for sheetmetal in more serious accidents. However, for small holes or dents the size of softballs and other filler jobs, it's a lifesaver—and when it sets, it becomes extremely solid. Modern day bondo doesn't shrink and typically doesn't peel, and when the damaged area is properly prepped, using a grinder to get down to clean, bare metal, and filled with bondo no more than 1/8-inch thick then sanded to a smooth finish and painted, it will hold up extremely well. Body shops will utilize this method more readily than replacing metal finish because the latter process involves more time and, ultimately, more expense for the owner, since the metal has to be cut out and a new piece welded back in. Painting becomes more involved as well.


Regrettably, there is still in existence the body shop that lathers on bondo two inches in thickness, putting it on like mud to drywall. Eventually, such actions will result in certain consequences, many of them dire. Thus, when there is more substantial damage, nothing replaces a metal fender like a metal fender, and it is wise to choose a body shop that does what you expect it to do and that it is to utilize proper replacement parts and the skilled technicians to handle the repairs.