Chameleon Articles Directory

Paintless dent repair, PDR

May
25

Vehicle wraps & decals ? Throughout the 1990s, automotive paints and vehicle body materials were high quality and much more resilient to bending. Since both the paint and the body could be bent without significant damage to the paint or permanent damage to the body materials, an entire industry formed based around the concept and technology of repairing dents.

So, we’ve explained what the procedure looks like — assuming it was done properly. And as you could probably guess there are a lot of ways an amateur or first-timer can get it wrong. It’s different than most other car repairs because it’s not about mechanical prowess; it’s more about control and the ability to maintain a steady hand and a gentle pace. You can’t rush it. The problem is, once a sheet metal repair starts to go awry, you’re usually much, much worse off than if you’d just left it alone. Metal holds its shape, but only to a certain point. Let’s say you get a dent in the hood — nothing too drastic, just a shallow, even dent with no sharp creases in an area that’s pretty easy to reach. You think it’ll be easy to pop it out on your own, so you begin to massage the underside while holding your shaping tool in place. You’ve made good progress so far, and a casual observer wouldn’t even notice the flawed area. But it’s not exactly perfect, and since it’s been fairly easy to this point, you decide to keep massaging the area to make it flawless. After a few more minutes of massaging, you realize that you’ve pushed it just a little too far. And now you’ve got this flabby area on the hood where you stretched out the metal. And there’s no easy way to shrink it back down. Keep going and it’ll stretch even more. Lesson learned.

Use Hot Glue, Wooden Dowels, & Screws: When you attempt to take out dents yourself, you always put the risk that you might further damage your car, whether you make the dent worse or chip the paint. A safe way of trying to take out big dents on your car is by using several wooden dowels, a few screws, and a hot glue gun. Simply place two nails into each side of the dowel and put the hot glue on the bottom. Place the dowels glue-side down in areas around the dent, repeat as many times as needed to cover the area, let them dry, and pull each one out until the dent is gone.

Applying dry ice to the dent is an effective way for fixing hail damage. The huge change in temperature can force the dents to pop out. Everything for you to do is just moving the dry ice around the damaged area to cool the area rapidly. But be careful as dry ice will damage your skin if you don’t wear gloves when handling it. Fixing hail damage by dry ice can be a cool solution, but sometimes it can not remove all of the dents. So in this case, you will need to do additional repairs.

The two techniques mentioned above will remove the majority of hail damage on your car, but a professional job at your local auto body shop is recommended for deep dents or badly damaged surfaces. The services tend to be cheap, fast and rarely require a new paint job. However, it is a good idea to compare prices and offered services at various body shops to see which package works best for your wallet and car’s situation.

We recommend going to a professional repair service to avoid a lot of extra costs. Meet EvidentPDR in Colorado. Ben Lincoln has been working on cars since childhood and found a passion for Dent Repair at an early age of 15. Not many find their calling in life so quickly, let alone in the dent repair industry. After identifying his passion, he harnessed his talents and became the 256th person to become VALE Master Craftsman certified in the world (there are only ~600 as of July 2018). During the last 12 years he has assembled a veteran team to share his vision: To deliver the best workmanship, relentlessly focusing on customer service, and going above and beyond expectations to make sure every customer is proud to do business with Evident PDR! See extra details on Paintless dent repair.

Automotive Comments Off on Paintless dent repair, PDR

Comments

Comments are closed.