Frank Heredia doesn’t just paint cars. He doesn’t just repair body panels, nor does he just do framework. Heredia makes art. He takes cars, sometimes crumpled from wrecks and in dire need of repair, and turns them into eye-catching beauties.
His shop, Frank’s Auto Refinishing, located on Fourth Avenue just south of 31st Street, has been a mainstay in South Tucson for 20 years. Heredia’s experience goes much further back than that, however.
“I was 14 when I first started working on cars,” says the 51-year-old Heredia. “My older brother would always be working on his car and I was always around it. It got me into it and I have been doing it ever since.”
Car culture is prevalent in South Tucson. Frank’s is one of 10 auto body shops in the one square mile city, which has an unusually high density. The greater Tucson area has a total of 103, or roughly one for every two square miles of city space. What makes Heredia’s shop different from the rest of them?
“We care, it’s our name on the shop so people associate with the work we do with our name,” says Heredia’s son, Frank Heredia Jr. “We charge what we do because the quality is top notch. We take pride in what we do.”
Heredia Jr. has been working with his father on cars since he was just getting into grade school. At the ripe young age of nine, he was doing paint preparation on cars for his dad. Not all of it was because he wanted to do it, of course.
“When I was growing up, my dad would make me sand down cars as a punishment,” says Heredia Jr.
Now he is grown up and focuses on the business aspect for the shop. He does the number crunching, dealing with insurance companies and ordering parts to replace on damaged cars. He is getting the feel for the business still and someday plans to take over the shop when his father is ready to hand over the reins.
In addition to the hard-work attitude, the shop is set apart from others by its spread of magazine coverage and trophies that line one of the walls for various cars that Heredia has entered into car shows. One of his most decorated cars was a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, the first car he ever owned. Heredia was able to take the car he bought for just $300 and transformed it to a beauty that won awards and graced pages of magazines.
Heredia’s history of success and artistry with cars has turned out to help the shop through this tough economic time. The people he has met at car shows and have seen his work have him do work on their cars. His long rooted history in South Tucson also makes him well known and allows people to come to him with problems they are having with their cars. Frank’s also benefits from the diversity of work the shop offers. It doesn’t just deal with custom work, but also deals with normal auto-collisions and with insurance.
Insurance work has its positives and negatives for the shop, however. Heredia says that since insurance companies have started giving checks to claims customers, people come to them wanting to get a cheap fix and pocket some of the money for themselves.
“I tell those people to get in their car and go somewhere else,” says Heredia. “We fix the cars right and they will look good and last a long time because of the quality that goes into them.”
The shop offers four-year warranties for any work done, compared to the industry-norm one-year warranty.
Heredia embodies the hard-working class of Americans that has been fortunate enough to find a passion at a young age and be able to turn it into a career. Ultimately, he is happy he gets to do something that people can benefit from, which is why he puts out a great product for his customers.
“I like helping people,” says Heredia. “I hate seeing people get screwed over.”