The sun's not up, the streets are dark but the air is filled with the thunk-tap of the bodyman's hammer, the pssssht of the painter's spray gun and the znit-znit of the welder at his work.

Whose cars are these? Joe says, "Most of my customers are older guys like me. When you start young, your customers tend to follow you." He means your customers will follow you if you're good. Joe Vicente has been an auto-body man for over 30 years; he's very good.

But this morning, he's frowning at the back end of an elderly Delta 88. The car – it looks like a sofa on wheels – was rear-ended. Joe repaired it, it's been sanded and now it's ready to paint.

PHOTOGALLERY: JOE AUTO

Normally there's a serial number on the door or under the hood - a number to indicate the precise details of the factory paint formula. But there's no serial number on this old car and it's an odd colour, blood-red, not standard. The shade will be hard to duplicate unless he has the formula. Joe does not have the formula.

Hmm. He consults his binders. Looks at the car. Licks his thumb, turns a page, goes back and forth with chips of paint. Hmm.

Finally, after 40 minutes of eyeballing and triple-checking samples, he settles on a shade of magenta.

Joe's brother Peter – they've worked together for years – takes the formula and heads upstairs where the paints are stored.

Peter double-checks the formula and selects eight cans of tint: rich maroon and deep maroon, carbon black and violet, violet red and bright metallic, lamp black and glimmer metallic. He dribbles precise amounts into a mixing can on a digital scale. He's got to be precise – a drop one way or the other and the shade won't match. He adds a blob of acrylic, sticky and golden as honey, then heads for the spray room.

Joe Vicente learned the auto body business in Portugal. He didn't spend time in trade school. His father knew a guy who had a body shop; his mother was a friend of that man's wife; the man agreed to give little Joe a job.

He was 13 years old then; he's 60 now. He may not have much in the way of formal education, but he knows one or two things you won't find in a book.

"I had a guy here once, a nice guy, but he never came to work on time. 'I missed my bus, the roads were bad, my mother was sick.' Always an excuse. One day he came in at 8:30 when he was supposed to be here at 6:00. I said, 'Sit down. Go sit over there. I'll pay you. Just sit there.' After half an hour I said, 'Are you happy?' He said no. I said, 'Well, I'm not happy when you come late.' After that, he came on time."

At the front end of the shop, Richard Rodrigues works on a little Mercedes which had been sideswiped. The rear quarter-panel was smashed. The car was a write-off, but the owner loves it, so he brought it here. Richard was sitting cross-legged on the floor, tapping the rocker panel with his hammer, when he heard an odd sound – hollow, dull and wrong. He poked, he prodded, he found a lump of body filler. A big lump, and another, from a previous repair. He curled his lip in disgust.

"Whoever did this did a lousy job."

Richard cuts the panel with a blow torch, scrapes away the cheese, and welds the damage with a custom-fitted piece of metal; as the welded metal cools, he sands the wheel-well, judging as he goes, feeling his work with his hand. "I guess this is the boring part." He says it with a laugh. "I find the line and follow it." Boring? There are days when art is boring, too. But there is no more useful art than work well done.

Joe turns his attention to a scratch in the plastic bumper of an airline limo. Not much of a scratch. If it was your car, you'd live with it.

Joe Vicente will retire soon. He's not sure when. He isn't sure who'll run the shop. Times change. "Used to be that a carpenter, a good mechanic, a body man was something; today, everybody wants to be something else."

Used to be that bumpers were made of metal, not plastic.

Times change.