Collision Repair
Pulled and measured before a single panel goes back on.
Free estimates on collision damage at 201 S Ong Street, insurance handled directly, and free pick-up if the car cannot be driven in.
Chapter 01
The damage you can see is rarely all of it
A hit that leaves one creased quarter panel has usually moved something behind it. The panel is what the owner photographs and sends to the insurance company. The mounting points, the reinforcement behind the bumper cover, and the gaps around the door are what actually decide whether the car is right again afterward, and none of those show up in a phone photo.
The tell is almost always a gap. A hood that sits a little proud on one side. A door that suddenly needs a shove it never needed before. A trunk lid whose seam runs wide at one end and tight at the other. Any one of those means the frame moved, even on a car with no visible dent anywhere near it, which is why we would rather look at the car in the lot than at a picture of it, and the estimate to do that costs nothing.
Close-up of a white Mercedes-AMG front grille and panel marked up with marker-pen inspection notes
Straighten, then panel, then paint, in that order
Frame straightening comes first, then panels, then paint, and never in another order, because painting a panel that is sitting slightly wrong just paints over the problem. Dent removal and spot repair handle the metal that will take it. A panel that will not straighten cleanly gets replaced instead of pushed back into a shape it will not hold. The color match that follows is its own job, worth its own attention, and we cover it in full on our auto painting page.
We are at 201 S Ong Street in Amarillo, and most of what comes through that door is insurance work. We accept insurance payment coverage and deal with the adjuster directly, matching what the claim covers to what the car actually needs, so the owner is not the one relaying numbers back and forth between two offices. It is the same thing Coury handled for a customer whose VW Tiguan came in last year, staying in touch with her the whole way through so she was not left guessing.
Chapter 03
What a repair should still look like in five years
A collision repair fails slowly and visibly, not all at once. The repaired panel starts to hold a slightly different sheen than the metal around it, or the edge of the paint blend begins to show at the wheel arch after a few Panhandle summers in the sun. Neither of those shows up the day the car leaves the shop. Both of them are exactly what the order of operations above is meant to prevent.
That is also what the lifetime warranty on the paint is for. If a repair Acme did ever starts to look wrong, we stand behind the work. In the meantime, here is a way to check any repair, ours or anyone else's: stand at the corner of the car in daylight and sight straight down the body line from front to back. A line that runs true tells you the metal underneath is straight too.
Acme — BBB accredited since 2003. I-CAR trained, ASE-certified technicians. Call (806) 373-5349.
Color matching after a repair is its own craft, covered in full on our auto painting page. If the vehicle that got hit is a work truck rather than a personal car, see how we handle fleet vehicle repair, where downtime matters as much as the damage itself.