# Our Story > How a Yorba Linda shop moved from ordinary collision work to forty foot coaches, fleet vans, and full vehicle systems repair. Source: https://ocrv.info/about/our-story OCRV Center is a Yorba Linda body shop that repairs recreational and large commercial vehicles rather than passenger cars. The shop grew into coach length work, fiberglass, and vehicle systems because Eastvale owners kept arriving with units no standard collision shop could physically accept or correctly repair. Specialization here started as a scheduling problem. Large units tied up a bay for weeks, blocked the door, and stalled the quick jobs a general collision shop depends on. Rather than turn those units away, the decision went the other direction. Bays were lengthened, the paint booth was replaced with one sized for a coach, and passenger car work was allowed to fall off the schedule. What remained was the work most shops decline: motorhomes, fifth wheels, toy haulers, box trucks, and vans built out for a trade. Eastvale owners were among the earliest steady customers, and they arrived by word of mouth rather than advertising. The drive runs roughly twenty miles, SR-71 down to SR-91, twenty five to thirty five minutes in ordinary traffic. Owners who had already been told no by two or three shops closer to home were willing to make that drive once they learned a forty foot unit would actually fit inside a building. Storage lots near Hamner Avenue and Archibald Avenue quietly did the referring. Fleet and vendor vehicle work arrived later and changed the shop again. A food truck or a municipal service body is a rolling workplace, so downtime costs money every day it sits. That pressure pushed the shop toward published labor rates, published price bands, and a department structure that lets structural, refinish, and systems work overlap instead of queue. Nothing goes out to a subcontractor. If a job requires paint, cabinetry, and a twelve volt rebuild, all three happen under the same roof on the same schedule. ## Why a general collision shop cannot take a forty foot coach Length is the first wall, but it is not the only one. A standard collision bay runs about twenty four feet deep with a door near ten feet high. A Class A coach needs more than triple that depth and a door clearance closer to fourteen feet, plus room to swing slide rooms out and set an awning arm on a stand. Add an overnight parking problem, because a unit that large cannot be moved to a side street at closing time, and most shops run out of building before they run out of interest. Construction is the second wall. A passenger car is a stamped steel unibody with published sectioning procedures and a repair method for every panel. A motorhome sidewall is a laminated sandwich: gel coated fiberglass skin, luan, block foam, aluminum or steel framing, and interior paneling, all bonded together. Damage travels through that stack instead of stopping at a panel edge. Repairing it means reading delamination by sound and moisture reading, cutting back to sound laminate, and rebuilding the layers in sequence. A technician trained only on sheet metal has no procedure to follow. - Bay depth and door height for units past forty feet - A paint booth long enough to hold a full length coach with the doors closed - Frame and body measuring equipment that reaches a motorhome chassis - Fiberglass and composite lamination space held at a stable temperature - Technicians who work on twelve volt and one hundred twenty volt systems daily - Secured overnight storage for a vehicle that cannot be parked on the street ## The Eastvale side of the schedule Eastvale sits in Riverside County, north of the Santa Ana River and west of Jurupa Valley, and the housing stock there produced a lot of RV owners in a short span. Side yards fill with fifth wheels and travel trailers. Contractors and food vendors keep work vehicles at home or in nearby yards off Limonite Avenue. When something gets hit, backed into, or soaked through a roof seam, the nearest shop that can physically take the vehicle is often not the nearest shop on the map. Most Eastvale customers drive south on SR-71 and pick up SR-91 westbound, then exit near Weir Canyon Road. That is roughly twenty miles and twenty five to thirty five minutes outside of peak hours. Owners hauling a long trailer often leave before seven in the morning to stay ahead of the SR-91 crawl, and a few prefer Green River Road as a surface alternate when the corridor stacks up. Drop off timing matters more with a fifty foot combination than with a sedan, so arrival windows get set in advance. Referral patterns spread outward from there. Corona and Norco owners came next, then Mira Loma, Chino, Chino Hills, and Ontario. None of that came from a campaign. It came from one owner telling another that the coach went inside a building, the estimate matched the invoice within the supplement lines that were explained in advance, and the slide worked when the unit came back out. That is a slow way to build a customer base, and it is the only one that has held up. ## Publishing rates instead of quoting them one at a time Posting the labor rates was an argument inside the shop before it was a policy. The concern was that a number without context invites comparison shopping against shops doing different work. What settled it was the volume of conversations that ended in a number anyway, usually after twenty minutes of the customer guessing. Now the rates sit in writing: body and paint at $210 per hour, mechanical and electrical at $260, diagnostics at $285, detail at $95. Materials, tax treatment, and parts markup are posted the same way. Price bands followed for the same reason. An owner asking about a torn awning or a soft floor section wants a range before committing to a drive across two counties. A range is not an estimate and it does not survive contact with a teardown, but it does tell someone whether the repair sits in the hundreds or the thousands. Publishing bands also disciplines the estimating desk. When a written figure lands far outside the posted band, someone has to explain why in the file, and that explanation usually improves the estimate. - Body and paint labor at $210 per hour - Mechanical and electrical labor at $260 per hour - Diagnostic labor at $285 per hour - Detail labor at $95 per hour - Paint supplies at $55 per paint hour and body supplies at $5 per body hour - Hazmat and disposal at $45 flat, with sales tax of 7.75 percent applied to parts and materials only - Parts markup of 100 percent at or under $100 and 35 percent above $100 ## How the departments came apart and back together Early on, one technician followed a job from teardown to delivery. That works while the floor holds only a handful of jobs and collapses past that point, because the person laying fiberglass in the morning is not the person who should be terminating twelve volt circuits in the afternoon. Splitting the floor into six departments fixed the bottleneck: estimating, structural, refinish, systems, interior, and delivery. Each group owns a stage, writes into the same file, and hands off with the vehicle documented rather than described. Handoff notes took the longest to get right. Keeping every trade in house was the other structural decision. Subcontracting paint or upholstery moves a vehicle off the property, adds transport risk on a unit that is already apart, and puts a second company between the customer and the answer. It also makes schedule promises unreliable, since the second shop is running its own queue. The tradeoff is that this building has to carry a booth, a lamination room, a cabinet shop, and a systems bench that all sit idle some weeks. That cost is accepted deliberately. What has not changed is the scope line. The shop repairs bodies, structure, fiberglass, interiors, paint, and vehicle systems. It does not rebuild engines or transmissions, does not perform drivetrain work, and does not handle DOT inspection or emission testing. Saying that out loud early saves everyone a wasted trip from Eastvale, and it keeps the floor pointed at the work the building was actually equipped to do. Referrals for the excluded work go out at the estimating desk rather than after teardown. ## Frequently asked questions ### Does the shop still work on passenger cars? No. The floor is set up for length, height, and laminated construction, which means the tooling, the booth, and the technician skill set all point at large units. A sedan can technically fit, but it would occupy a bay built for a coach and would be handled by people who spend their days on fiberglass and vehicle systems. Owners looking for standard automotive collision work are better served by a shop built around it. ### Why is the shop in Yorba Linda if the customers are in Eastvale? The building came first and the customer base grew toward it. A parcel large enough for a thirty five thousand square foot shop, plus turnaround room and fenced storage for long units, is not easy to find. Eastvale became the primary market because the drive is straightforward, roughly twenty miles by way of SR-71 and SR-91, and because owners there kept running into shops that could not take the vehicle. There is no second location; everything happens at the La Palma Avenue building. ### How did fleet and commercial work change things? Fleet vehicles brought a different clock. A municipal service body or a vendor truck is a revenue tool, so the conversation starts with return date rather than repair method. That pushed the shop into tighter parts sourcing, earlier supplement writing, and parallel scheduling across departments so paint and systems are not waiting on each other. It also expanded the vehicle list to box trucks, cargo vans, and specialty builds, which share more with coach work than with passenger car repair. ### Is any of the work sent to another shop? No. Structural repair, fiberglass lamination, refinish, cabinetry, upholstery, and twelve volt and one hundred twenty volt systems work all happen in the same building. The only things leaving the property are parts orders and the excluded categories the shop does not perform at all, such as engine or transmission rebuilds, drivetrain repair, DOT inspection, and emission testing. Those are identified at the estimate stage so an owner is not surprised after the vehicle is already apart. --- OCRV Center. 23281 La Palma Ave, Yorba Linda, CA 92887. (949) 799-3387. info@ocrvcenter.com. Serving Eastvale, California in Riverside County, about 20 miles from the shop. All work is performed in shop at the Yorba Linda facility. No mobile, roadside or on-site service is offered. Scope is body, paint, structural, fiberglass, interior and vehicle systems work. Engine rebuilds, transmission rebuilds, drivetrain work, DOT inspections and emission testing are not performed.