--- title: "Paint and Body Repair Services | Rancho Santa Margarita" description: "The refinish line and the panel bench in one department at $210 per hour, with paint supplies at $55 per paint hour. All spraying done in shop at Yorba Linda." focus_keyword: "paint and body services rancho santa margarita" canonical: https://ocrv.me/services/paint-and-body-services/ kind: serviceCategory updated: 2026-07-29 source: OCRV Center --- # Paint and Body Services for Rancho Santa Margarita Owners > Two services, one department: **the panel bench and the refinish line**. Both post at $210 per hour, with **paint supplies at $55 per paint hour** on anything that gets sprayed. ## What sits in the paint and body department? Paint and body services cover the two repairs that end in a finish: body repair and paint and refinishing. Both run through the prep deck, the mixing room and the downdraft booth at our Yorba Linda shop, and both post at the body and paint rate for Rancho Santa Margarita owners. - Sanding air and wet air are kept on separate decks - Every formula is retained per unit for the next repair - Aluminum tooling never touches steel work on this bench - Supplies bill per hour of the work that consumed them ### Key facts | Item | Value | | --- | --- | | Services in this group | 2 (Body repair and paint and refinishing) | | Department rate | $210 per hour (Same rate for metal work and for spraying) | | Paint supplies | $55 per paint hour (Body supplies bill at $5 per body hour) | | Colour retrieval | X-Rite MA-5 QC spectrophotometer (Multi angle reads with a variance library) | | Basecoat lines | PPG Envirobase and Axalta Cromax (Waterborne, mixed in house to a retained record) | | Written estimate | $150 (Credited in full against an authorized repair) | Two services sit in this group and they are joined at the hip. Body repair puts the shape back. Paint and refinishing puts the surface back. Neither one is finished without the other, and an owner who books only half of it gets a straight panel in the wrong colour or a beautiful finish over a shape that is still slightly out. What follows is how the department is arranged, because on refinish work the arrangement of the building is most of the result. Air, dust and temperature decide whether a repair is invisible from ten feet, and none of that is something a customer can see on an estimate line. ## What the paint and body department actually is Physically it is four places. A panel bench with stud welders, slide hammers, pneumatic rivet and Huck bolt tooling for box body and trailer skins, a panel saw and shear so replacement siding is cut to profile here rather than ordered to size. A separate prep deck. A mixing room. And the downdraft booth with heated cure at the end of the line. Aluminum work has its own sanding and forming tools that never touch steel, because steel particles embedded in aluminum start corrosion that shows up as blistering under a finish two years later. That separation costs money to maintain and it is invisible on the invoice, which is exactly why it is worth saying out loud on a page like this one. - Panel bench: pulling, riveting, bonding and siding cut to profile - Prep deck: all sanding, filling and masking, kept away from wet work - Mixing room: scales, waterborne lines and retained records per unit - Booth: downdraft with heated cure for the final finish ## Sanding air and wet air never mix The single most common cause of a visible repair is dust, and dust is an air problem rather than a cleanliness problem. If a panel is being flatted in the same volume of air where another panel is wet, particles land on the wet one. It does not matter how carefully either job is done. So prep happens on its own deck with its own extraction and the booth is downdraft, which pulls contamination toward the floor and away from the surface being sprayed. Heated cure then takes the finish through its schedule at a controlled temperature instead of at whatever a Yorba Linda afternoon happens to be doing. > **note:** If a finish looks slightly gritty under raking light six months later, that is almost always airborne contamination at spray time. It cannot be polished out of a basecoat, only out of clear. ## The mixing room keeps a record for your unit Colour on an older vehicle is not what the code says. A finish that has faced south in Orange County for eight seasons has moved, and metallics and pearls move unevenly along a long flank. So the mixing room starts from a multi angle read taken with an X-Rite MA-5 QC at more than one point on the vehicle, not from a paint code alone. The resulting formula is written down against your unit and kept. That is the part owners appreciate later: when the same coach comes back three years on with a different scrape, we start from the record we made rather than from scratch, and the second repair matches the first as well as it matches the vehicle. ## The two services in this group Body repair is the shape side. Dents that stay dents, panel replacement, bumpers and their mounts, fenders and quarter skins. It is the service to start with when something is bent, creased or missing and you are not sure yet whether it can be worked or has to be replaced. Paint and refinishing is the surface side. Full unit repaints, single panel blends, colour matching, graphics and correction of a finish that is already on the vehicle. It is where a job goes when the metal or composite is right and the appearance is not, and it is also the second half of nearly every body repair. ## How booth time gets scheduled The booth is a single resource and a large vehicle occupies all of it, so booth time is booked as a block rather than fitted around other work. A full unit repaint commits the booth for a substantial part of its duration, which is why we schedule those as projects with a start date instead of slotting them between smaller jobs. Panel work is different. A blend on one flank needs the booth for hours rather than days, and those jobs are stacked around the large ones. If your unit needs both bodywork and a repaint, the bodywork happens first in a bay and the booth slot is reserved for when the prep is signed off, not before. ## Rates, supplies and where the money goes Both services post at $210 per hour. The difference between them shows in supplies rather than in rate: body hours carry $5 per hour in body supplies, paint hours carry $55 per hour in paint supplies, and a job that is mostly spraying therefore looks materially different on the invoice from a job of the same length that is mostly metal work. Parts follow the standard policy, 100 percent markup at or under $100 and 35 percent above it, with sales tax on parts and materials and no tax on labor. A written estimate is $150 and credits in full against an authorized repair, and a fifty percent deposit applies once a job passes $2,000. ## Where this department hands off Upstream, anything that moved a load path goes to the structural department first, because there is no point fitting a panel to a reference that is about to change. Downstream, correction and protection of a cured finish belongs to the detail side at a different rate, which is why polishing a two year old finish and de nibbing a fresh one are not the same line item. Sideways, a repair that opens a wall or a roof brings in the department that owns that assembly. We keep those lines separate on the estimate so an owner or an adjuster can read which crew did what, and so nobody pays refinish hours for interior access work. ## Questions and answers ### What is the difference between the body bench and the refinish line? The bench restores shape and the line restores surface. Pulling, riveting, bonding and cutting siding to profile happen at the bench. Flatting, masking, mixing and spraying happen on the prep deck and in the booth. Most repairs use both, in that order, and both post at the same hourly rate. ### Why is sanding done on a separate deck from spraying? Because dust is an air problem, not a housekeeping one. Flatting a panel in the same volume of air as a wet panel puts particles on the wet one no matter how careful either job is. A separate prep deck plus a downdraft booth keeps contamination moving away from the surface being sprayed. ### Does the shop keep a record of the formula used on my vehicle? Yes, tied to your unit rather than to the paint code. We read the existing finish with a multi angle spectrophotometer at several points, build the formula from that, and retain it. When the same vehicle comes back years later for different damage, the second repair starts from the first one rather than from scratch. ### How is booth time scheduled against bodywork on the same unit? Bodywork happens first in a bay, and the booth slot is reserved for when prep is signed off rather than booked at intake. A full repaint commits the booth for a large part of its duration, so those are scheduled as blocks with a start date. Single panel blends are stacked around them. ### Are paint supplies billed separately from the labor hours? Yes, and per hour of the work that consumed them. Paint hours carry $55 per hour in paint supplies and body hours carry $5 per hour in body supplies. Two jobs of identical length can therefore invoice quite differently depending on how much of the time was spent spraying rather than working metal. ### Should I book body repair or refinishing first? Book the one that describes your problem and let the intake sort the sequence. If something is bent, creased or missing, that is body repair and refinishing follows it. If the shape is right and only the appearance is wrong, refinishing is the whole job. One estimate covers both either way. --- Source: [OCRV Center](https://ocrv.me/services/paint-and-body-services/). Last verified 2026-07-29.