# Towing and Recovery Company Repair > A recovery operator has the same problem as their customers with none of the sympathy. The truck that rescues other vehicles has no equivalent to call, the damage usually came from the work rather than from an accident, and every hour it is here is an hour of missed calls that nobody else covers. Source: https://ocrv.biz/who-we-help/commercial-business/towing-recovery-companies/ Business: OCRV Center, 23281 La Palma Ave, Yorba Linda, CA 92887. (949) 799-3387. Serving Tustin, California. ## What damage does recovery work actually produce? Almost none of it is from being hit. On a [tow truck](/vehicles/buses-fleet/tow-truck-repair/) or a [flatbed carrier](/vehicles/commercial-heavy/flatbed-truck-repair/), the damage is from loading, from winching at angles the equipment was not meant to pull at, and from casualty vehicles that are not cooperating. The deck takes it first. Gouged decking, bent rails, damaged approach ramps, worn tie down points and D rings that have been loaded past their rating. Floor repair and replacement in wood, aluminium and steel deck runs $500 to $9,500. E track, D ring and tie down installation runs $250 to $2,500 and replacing a stretched anchor is not optional work. Then the mounting points. A boom, a wheel lift or a bed subframe transmits every recovery load into the chassis, and the evidence appears as cracked welds, elongated bolt holes and body to frame movement long before anything visibly bends. Frame and structural welding and repair runs $750 to $20,000, and on this category it is genuinely a safety item rather than a cosmetic one. Then the body: corners taken on scene, fender damage from tight recoveries, and light bars destroyed by everything. ## How do you repair a truck that cannot stop working? By splitting the work rather than doing it all at once. Recovery operators are the hardest scheduling problem on this site because call volume is unpredictable and coverage cannot lapse. What works is defining the minimum outage. Deck and tie down work is often a two day job with no booth time. Lighting and electrical is frequently a day. Structural and mounting work needs longer and cannot be rushed, but it can be scheduled against a known quiet period rather than taken as an emergency. Paint and refinish is the item to batch. Fleet collision repair and paint refinish runs $1,500 to $50,000, and a full cosmetic refresh on a wrecker is booth limited work that should be planned rather than reacted to. Operators with more than one truck rotate them through the booth one at a time over a season. Everything happens in the shop, where the lift capacity, the welding equipment and the booth are. Plan the outage rather than hoping it will be short. ## What about lighting and visibility? It is the most frequently damaged system and the one with the most direct consequence. Light bar, strobe and emergency lighting install runs $400 to $3,500. Reflective tape and compliance marking runs $250 to $1,200. Two things go wrong repeatedly. Lighting gets replaced piecemeal until a truck carries four generations of fixture with four different colour temperatures, which reads as poorly maintained to everybody who sees it including the agencies that assign calls. And wiring gets extended, spliced and tapped until a single corroded connection takes out half the rear of the truck. Lighting and wiring diagnostics run $285 to $2,500. When a truck is in for anything else, the lighting harness is worth an hour of attention. It is the cheapest reliability improvement available on a recovery vehicle and it is almost never the reason the truck came in. ## Who pays when the damage happened during a recovery? It depends on whose vehicle caused it and what your policy says, and it is worth understanding before it happens. Damage to your equipment during a recovery may fall under your own physical damage coverage, under on hook or garagekeepers coverage, or under the third party's liability, and the three behave very differently. What we contribute is documentation that survives scrutiny. Photographs of the damage as received, an assessment of the mechanism where it can be determined from the deformation, line item pricing with hours, and a written record of any pre existing condition in the same area. Recovery files get disputed more often than average, largely because the incident happened at a scene rather than at an intersection. Name every interested party at intake. A file with an insurer, a customer's insurer and a lienholder in it stalls over payee questions far more often than over repair questions. The [insurance section](/insurance/) covers supplements, reinspections and the appraisal clause. ## Questions ### Can you repair a deck without replacing the whole bed? Usually yes. Decking, rails, approach ramps and anchor points are all repairable or replaceable in sections, and the decision comes down to whether the subframe underneath is straight. Bring it empty so the underside can be assessed properly on a lift rather than guessed at. ### Our wrecker has cracks around the boom mount. How urgent is that? Immediately urgent. Cracking at a mounting point means load is being transferred somewhere it was not designed to go, and the failure mode is sudden rather than progressive. Structural welding and repair runs $750 to $20,000 and this is not a category where deferring is a reasonable option. ### Can we get the truck back the same week? For deck, tie down, lighting and body hardware work, frequently yes, because none of it needs paint booth time. Structural repair and refinish are longer and the timeline is set by cure times and welding sequence rather than by how busy we are. ### Do you refinish and letter recovery trucks? Yes. Full refinish runs $5,000 to $35,000, vinyl wrap $1,500 to $9,500 and decal and graphics replacement $500 to $5,500. Operators generally do this alongside structural or deck work so the truck comes out of one outage rather than two. ## Related - [Tow Trucks](https://ocrv.biz/vehicles/buses-fleet/tow-truck-repair/) - [Flatbed Trucks](https://ocrv.biz/vehicles/commercial-heavy/flatbed-truck-repair/) - [Frame and Structural Repair](https://ocrv.biz/services/frame-structural-repair/) - [Welding and Metal Fabrication](https://ocrv.biz/services/custom-fabrication/welding-metal-fabrication/) - [Commercial and Business](https://ocrv.biz/who-we-help/commercial-business/) - [Prices and Posted Rates](https://ocrv.biz/prices/)