The eye of the storm

Walk into almost any repair shop in Perth and there are two things that hit you: the number of cars in the shop and the number of cardboard boxes.

The Australasian Paint & Panel team is presently judging the AAMI/AP&P Autobody Repairer of the Year Awards and was in Perth to look at the locally nominated shops.

Repairers there are all battling to deal with an enormous amount of hail damage repair after the West Australian capital was hit by a freak hail storm; the first such storm repairers in their 60s had ever seen.

While there might be an instant leap for joy, as large numbers of jobs come into the shops, repairers in the West soon realised that there was a lot more than just repairing the hail-damaged vehicles, especially those who specialise in prestige motors.

The major problem repairers are facing is one of space.

Because of the large number of jobs, some parts are scarce, so there are many cars sitting in repairers' yards waiting for one part to arrive so the job can be finished.

So there is a car, not being worked on, but taking up space in the workshop waiting for parts to arrive.

But well before that stage is the fact that some repairs require the entire stripping of the vehicle, a full respray and the reassemble.

While those cars are being prepped and painted, all the trim has to be removed and stored somewhere.

When you are just talking about repairing a quarter panel or a bonnet, the trim can be stored in a box.

But when it involves stripping the entire car, it’s a very big box that’s needed.

The next problem is also parts, at the other end of the scale.

Parts are ordered and delivered, but the time it takes to repair a hail-damaged car means many of these parts have to be stored until the vehicle repair can be carried out.

Some prestige repair ships are, in fact, carrying several hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of parts, and that’s never good for the cash flow.

Like all new things to present themselves, repairers in Western Australia are coming to live with the problems associated with repairing hail-damaged cars.

Many we spoke to say if a hailstorm ever hits Perth again, they will take a different approach to the repair process.