Commercial and Heavy Vehicles

What we do and what we do not

Being direct about scope saves everyone time.

We do: collision and body repair, structural and frame work, full repaints and fleet colour standardisation, cargo and box body repair, reefer panel work, lift gate installation and repair, service and utility body work, custom fabrication, equipment mounting, graphics and wraps, and DOT reflective marking.

We do not: engine work, drivetrain, aftertreatment, or DOT inspections.

That is a deliberate scope. What it means practically is that for body, frame, cargo body and paint work on a commercial vehicle you are dealing with a shop equipped for large vehicles, and for mechanical work you need your usual truck shop.

Vehicles

Box trucks and straight trucks, semi tractors, flatbeds and stake beds, refrigerated bodies, dump trucks, curtain side, beverage and parcel delivery bodies, and specialty commercial builds.

The failures that recur

Corner posts. Struck at loading docks, in alleys and at drive-throughs. The most common structural damage on any delivery fleet, and repairable by section replacement rather than body replacement.

Bottom rails. Damaged by forklifts and kerbs, and corroded from water sitting inside the rail section. Sectioning a rail is routine.

Rear frame and door apertures. Where the seal traps moisture and corrosion starts.

Floors. Wear, forklift damage and rot at the perimeter.

Reefer panels. Punctured or delaminated insulated panels, which lose thermal performance long before they look bad. A reefer losing temperature is frequently a box problem rather than a unit problem, and checking the box first saves refrigeration work that would not have fixed it.

Box and cargo body repair covers all of it in detail.

Downtime is the real cost

On a commercial vehicle the repair invoice is usually the smaller number. The larger one is the revenue the truck did not produce while it sat.

So we plan around it. Realistic dates rather than optimistic ones. Batching where a fleet has several units needing the same work. Doing off-vehicle portions of a job while the truck stays in service where the work allows. And, for operators with a recurring damage pattern, suggesting preventive work such as corner protection or rail guards that reduces the recurrence rather than just repairing it again.

Insurance and fleet claims

Fleet claims across multiple units are handled as a programme rather than a queue: per-unit assessment with VIN level documentation, a scope agreed with the carrier up front, then scheduled batches. Carriers process multi-unit claims far more smoothly when the documentation is per vehicle from the start.

What commercial body repair costs

Body labor is $210 per hour, structural $260. Insurance billed work may be written at carrier-negotiated rates. Full posted rates on the pricing page.

Preventive work that reduces recurrence

Most fleets have a damage pattern rather than random damage, and the pattern is usually a function of the environment the vehicle works in.

Delivery fleets working alleys and docks damage rear corners repeatedly. The answer is corner protection rather than repairing the same corner four times a year. Fleets loading with forklifts damage bottom rails and floors, and rail guards plus a properly specified floor pay for themselves within a couple of cycles. Vehicles operating in wet or corrosive environments need the corrosion-prone areas treated before perforation rather than sectioned afterwards.

We will point these out when we see them, because a shop that only repairs damage has an incentive not to, and a fleet that stops generating the same repair is a fleet that stays with the shop that told them how.

Working with fleet managers

The practical requests we get and how we handle them: consolidated invoicing rather than per-vehicle paperwork, per-unit documentation with VIN level records for insurance and internal accounting, scheduled batching so a fixed number of units are down at once, realistic completion dates that can be planned around, and a single point of contact rather than whoever answers.

For operators running recurring work such as rebranding across a fleet or a hail claim spanning dozens of units, we will build a rolling schedule up front rather than handling it as it comes.