rev up your engines, today I'm gonna show you how to spot a scam body shop before
you get towed into one and it's too late, okay it happens to everyone eventually
you get in an accident, then you have to have your car towed to a body shop, the
last thing you want is to be in an accident be knocked around and then the
tow truck guy comes and you let him decide where to tow it, you want to know
a good body shop beforehand, then write it down and put it in your glove box so
you'll have it at hand or put it on your phone, because by law at least here in
the United States you get in a wreck, you have the right to pick wehatever body
shop you want to fix your car, nobody can force you to go to one place, but you
have to understand, when the tow truck guys come, they generally get big
kickbacks if they got a nice big wreck and they tow it to the body shop that
they're affiliated with, they will get five hundred a thousand maybe even more
money for bringing that vehicle to that body shop, so you want to have one ready
that you trust to say, no tow it here and if you don't know one, you still have the
right to have it towed to your house, all the insurance companies will tow it to
your house then later they can tow it to a body shop, don't worry about that you
just want to send it to a good job and not just somebody who's being paid to
ship your car off because they get kickbacks, so how do you find out if a
body shop is a scam body shop or a really good one
well you got to do a little research here, unless you live in Houston Texas
then you can just ask me, who I use, I don't take any kickbacks I've sent many many
customers to body shops and never took a dime back from their repairs, I just want
my customers to get their cars fixed correctly, I don't do bodywork so it's no
skin off of my nose, and speaking of equipment you got to
make sure that the body shop you pick has a good paint booth, paint boots are
giant areas that are completely sealed, so there's no dust they control the
humidity for painting, it's very important for getting body work done
right, you don't want to have somebody paint in your car that doesn't have a
very good paint booth, try spray-painting something outside, you're gonna see
gets on it, hair everything, you got to have a place that has a good paint booth and
you have to have professional guys working there who know how to blend
paint and match it to the color of your car, because take a look at this, you can
easily tell this bumper has been repainted it's a completely different shade than
the top of the car that wasn't painted, I mean look at that, you can see here's the
one that's been repainted, it's completely a lighter color here it was
not blended correctly, the paint doesn't even match, so your visitor bodyshop say
hey show me a car where you painted part as a car, see if it matches
and if it doesn't they're not any good at blending paint, go someplace else and
speaking of painting bumpers, check this out
this bumper was painted by a guy who didn't even know what kind of paint to
put on the car, realize that these plastic bumpers are exactly that, they
are plastic it requires a special kind of paint with a special bonding agent in
order for it to stick, if you use regular car paint that you put on the hood and
put it on the bumper, guess what, it flakes off like this car
did, whoever painted this bumper they had no notion about how to paint plastic
bumpers, they shouldn't be in the body business and another big thing to check
is the body shop area itself, if like these cars all sitting all over the
place they got tons of them looks like they're busy, go back in a few weeks the
same cars are sitting there, that's just a scam that guys use, I used to work for a guy
like that years ago, he had all these junk cars and it would sucker people to come
in and he wasn't fixing any of those cars, you see all their stickers are out
of date, some of them don't have license plates on them, don't go to a place like
that cuz odds are, they're gonna take forever to fix your car and may not even
do a good job, because realize one thing body shop work, it comes and it goes it's
not a continuous thing, cars they break down all the time it's pretty continuous
cars you're always breaking you got to fix them, but car wrecks they occur kind
of randomly, so a lot of times these guys don't have much business at all
so if they're one of those guys that aren't that honest, they'll take your car in
and say, oh it'll be ready in three days, another car comes in they're gonna make
more money, they drop yours and then they just work on the car they're making more
money, I've seen guys have cars and body shops for months for this reason, ask
around, other people who they use and anybody who says that guy took forever
to fix my car, don't go there, you find a guy like me
I don't do bodywork, I do mechanical work but my whole thing was, if people got
here by 8:00 in the morning by 5:00 in the afternoon most of the work I did on
most of the cars were finished, I wanted to do stuff that we're in and out fast
my customers were happy, they told people about me, I never spent a nickel
advertising because all my customers told everyone about me, and of course you
want a place that's been in business a lot, but here's the kicker, you gotta do a
little bit of research because I had a guy he was a great body man, but as he
got older, he made a son take over the shop and his son had no interest in
doing bodywork on cars really, so it's time went on, I used the guy for a decade
and a half, but then when a son took over I sent customers there they could bring
the car over to me and I'd look at them and you could see scratches from the
sandpaper that they didn't make smooth and paint it over so it had permanent
scratches in it, you got to make sure that the person who's running to place
cares about what his shop puts out and here's where the Internet can really
help you out a lot, because of people have crappy bodywork done and it doesn't
look right, they're gonna complain on the Internet, so if you do a research on the
guy and you see, there's complaints all over the place about this guy
then you'd think, I'm not gonna go there I'm gonna go somewhere else and although
I'm always trying to save people money here, don't go too cheap with bodywork
you see those ads when I was a kid it used to be we'll paint any car for you
know 59.95 now it's like 200 or 300 dollars, you're not gonna get a very good
paint job of your car for that kind of money these days, I had my old Celica
done like five years ago at one of those places and you can see the paint's
flat, it just doesn't hold up, to do a good paint job costs a lot of money to
paint the entire car and speaking of a good shop
a good shop handles all insurance claims, you don't do anything, if they say
we want some money up front, you go someplace else, the good ones they all
use insurance companies where they call it up, they handle all the paperwork if
there's a problem they call up the insurance company and say, look we just
pulled off the bumper and found out that there's more damage underneath, then they
can send a guy to look to make sure that's the truth, you don't have to get
involved in the actual repair, and like anything you pretty
much have to feel out the shop, as people in Texas have always said, you don't want a guy
who's all hat and no cattle, or when I was younger in New York, hey you don't
want the guy who's got the motorcycle jacket, but he doesn't have the
motorcycle, there's plenty of good body shops out there, you just have to find them, but since
people are always getting in wrecks, hey that's your friends, see cars that were
wrecks that they had fixed, look at it closely and look at it in the Sun when the sun's
shining, because the human eye we can see millions of different varieties of
colors, you can see hey wow that was fixed really well or hey that
doesn't match at all or there's paint that's bubbled up or you look at the
fender the guy replaced and parts of the gaps or half an inch and other parts
are an inch and a half gap, you know that place does lousy work and don't go there
and when you do find a good body shop hey, pass the word of mouth around
go on the internet tell people, tell your friends about it, because if you find a
good body shop, you tell other people about it, they're going to continue to do
good work, especially when they say, hey Joe sent me, they don't want Joe to get
mad because if he's telling a bunch of people how good they are and he does
lousy work, they know they're gonna lose business and if they don't have to
spend me advertising money like I never spent, that's more money in their pocket
and less money out of yours that's paying for the body shop and the advertising, so
take a tip for me and find a good body shop before you get in a wreck, because
it's often too late then and you'll be stuck towed to some place where
everybody's getting kickbacks from everybody else and the work is
relatively shoddy, so if you never want to miss another one
of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!
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