Can Dents in Body Lines be Repaired using Paintless Dent Repair?
We get these types of questions all of the time. The short answer is Yes. Many factors come into play when determining if a dent can be repaired or not. These same factors all apply to body line damage. For instance if there is severe paint damage to the dent, sometimes paintless dent repair is not the best option. But that is not always true, some customers are ok with minor paint damage and they are happy to touch the panel up after the metal is repaired. We did another post about this recently talking about paint damage and dent repair, you can see that article here.
This repair had no type of paint damage and would be considered a medium sized depth for a dent. The access to this dent with paintless dent repair tools was pretty straight forward. Access through the upper window channel was all we needed in order to repair this damage. No removal of any parts on this vehicle was necessary in this repair making it easier for us to repair and a quicker repair.
Today we are going to repair a door ding in this 2018 Subaru Outback. As you can imagine if you had a new car, and it had a ding, you would not feel so good about it and would want a repair done.
How did this happen?
This damage was caused when the owners bicycle tipped over and bumped into her car door. The customer was scheduling to have her vehicle detailed and ceramic coated with our friends at Superior Detail and they discussed the damage. They then referred their customer to us for their door dent removal needs. We scheduled her in right away and made this repair in a short afternoon!
Be sure to see what the customer had to say about their dent repairs.
Have you ever wondered how we repair damage if we cannot get to the back side of the panel to push the damage out?
Well today we are going to answer that question for you.
For damage we cannot push out we have to resort to the glue pulling method of paintless dent removal. With this method we use a specialized glue in a glue gun, this glue gun is specifically made for paintless dent removal. We then apply this glue to a paintless dent removal glue tab, then glue this tab to the vehicle. We then use either a slider hammer or a mini lifter to pull the damage out. After a pull is made we then apply a release agent to remove the glue from the vehicle. From here we then repeat this process many times in order to pull the damage out. In is a very repetitive process but it is necessary to remove dents with no access.
You can see this entire process in this video we made a while back:
When Jude, the vehicles owner, brought this Camaro to us he was pretty upset with the damage. Jude was moving things around in his garage and a 2×4 piece of wood slipped and fell onto his newly purchased 2017 Chevy Camaro. He couldn’t believe what he had done, still in shock, he brought the vehicle in and we told him we would be able to repair this damage with our paintless dent repair method. He was sure that we could even though he had been told by another body shop in town “that cannot be fixed with paintless dent repair” and “it’ll need to be repainted.”
After the estimate we scheduled him in for a repair and we went to work on it right away. This type of repair was done in a day, verses a body shop, that would have the car for at least a WEEK! Plus then a bunch of the car would be repainted including the quarter panel, trunk lid and convertible top cover. It would then be reported to Carfax and heavily diminish the resale value dramatically!
After the repairs were done he was kind enough to do a video review of his repairs and experiences. The smile alone speaks for itself! We love making people happy and putting the pride back in their ride!
Today we are repairing this damage in a 2013 Cadillac ATS left side quarter panel. This damage impacted so deep it actually pushed the exterior sheet metal into the inner wheel house structure. This severe impact caused the exterior metal to to actually bend outwards and crack the paint on the edge of the panel.
Now with there being paint damage a person has two options: – Repaint the entire panel – Use touch up paint to touch the area up
This is a choice ultimately only the customer can make.
To give you a little more detail about these choices first off lets start off by choosing repaint the panel.
Repainting the Panel:
The entire panel requires repainting. Everything installed on the panel like tail lights and a bumper, would need to be removed. Other panels may require more items. Items such as door handles, trim, mirrors, glass, moldings and lights.
If this paint damage is near any other panels typically anything under 18 inches, the body shop will have to fade or blend, this is the industry term, the color into the other panel.
What if the paint is a specialized color like a pearl coat or tri coat, like this vehicle was?
That distance spreads much further for blending the paint. For this vehicle the left rear door, left quater panel and rear bumper would all need to be repainted. A minor scratch in one panel, say a door for example, could mean the ENTIRE side of the vehicle being repainted to get a correct color match!
Touch up the damage:
Now for touch up, it is exactly that. We or the customer are “touching up” the specific area with paint damage. How we explain touch up paint to a customer is like this:
Imagine a black shirt with a black button on it. Now the button blends in pretty well but it is still visible. This explains how a paint touch up might look when completed. Solid colors such as a straight black is the best candidate for touch up repairs. Other colors like pearl coats, quad coats and other unique colors like this, are sometimes not the best choice for touch up. At a minimum a small coat of a clear coat should always be applied over a small crack or chip to at least seal it from the outside elements.
This customer was actually referred to us from another body shop in Tea, South Dakota. The customer was a friend of theirs and the Body Shop knew that this repair would get extremely costly for the customer because of the pearl white tri coat stage paint finish. The customer did the paint touch up themselves and live with any possible color mismatch, they just wanted the dents to be repaired and we were happy to provide this service for them!
