You have just been through a traumatic accident. Now your vehicle is in the shop, and the damage needs to be fixed if you are going to drive the vehicle again. An auto body collision involving your doors may be minor, medium, or major when it comes to damage. See how an auto body shop approaches each level of damage and fixes it.

Minor (Dents, Window Cracks)

Minor damage to the car door is typically a quick fix. The technician will use one of two approaches to pop dents out of the affected doors. Then he or she will buff out the creases from the dents and repaint and polish the doors to make them look nice again. If the windows were affected, they are replaced with new auto glass, and then the power window switches are tested to make sure the new glass slips up and down easily within the tracks. 

Medium (Loss of Paint or Trim, Bent Door Frames)

When the car door needed to be pried open just to get you out of the vehicle, that is considered medium-level damage. A lot of tooling and possibly some welding will be needed to reshape the door. Paint and/or the trim will need a thorough overhaul to make it right again. Glass will definitely need replacing, as will some of the inner workings of the door locks and window opening mechanisms. For every door affected, you can expect at least a half day's work.

Major

In major collision damage to a door, it is crunched. It is definitely over and done for that door, and there is almost nothing you can do to get it back. The only thing the technician can do at this stage is replace the door entirely. He or she will call up salvage shops, dealerships, and a few other places to find a replacement door. It does not have to match the color of your vehicle, but it does have to belong to the same make, model, and year of the car. As part of the restoration process, the technician will strip the paint from the door, match it to your vehicle's own color, and then refinish and repaint the replacement door so that it looks just like the door that was once on the car. This process is repeated for every door that is deemed unrepairable until all of the doors on the vehicle are restored.

Call a company like Downtown Garage & Auto Body for more information.