You might ask yourself “how hard can dent repair be?” You’ve done many do it yourself style repairs throughout the years. Things around the house from minor repairs such as a door handle change. Maybe you even do major items such as plumbing, electrical or roofing. You change your own oil on your car and do other auto repairs, why not pop your own dent out? Today we are going to talk to you about do it your self dent repairs.
Dent Repair Myths
Dent just pop out
Use suction cups to suck the dents out
Use magnets to pull the damage out
Applying dry ice to the dent will make it come out
Heat like a hair drier makes the dents come out
Pour hot or even boiling water on the dent makes it come out
Applying a cold spray to the dent, perhaps even after heating makes the dent come out
Park your car in the hot sun and the dents will work there way out from the heat
Do these methods work?
Have you seen a video of a person putting a suction cup on a big dent on a car and pulling on it. The dent makes a popping noise as the suction cup comes off and the dent looksgone. Well it appears to look gone. Once it is looked at at multiply angles the damage will looks wavy or at least less noticeable. To some people this is exactly what they want. They want the damage to be not such a big eye sore, or noticeable at be the most affordable for price. For this expectation this might be the perfect solution. To others that want the damage to look as if it never happened and completely undetectable this is not an acquitted fix.
Once a repair is attempted its is often not fixable or much more difficult to make a proper repair.
Magnets and Hair Driers
We do not use any type of magnets to pull any type of damage out, and hair driers if used improperly can actually cause paint damage by overheating it. If the paint in say a white vehicle is overheated it will get yellow or brown and the only fix for this is to now repaint the panel. This damage can happen in other colors but it is harder to see in darker colors.
Cold and Dry Ice
There is an old school method of shrinking the metal when it is over stretched. When the metal can be pushed up as a high spot then lightly pushed on and it falls back in, and it will flip flop back and forth. To shrink metal you must put it through a very fast heat and cold cycle. To do this you take a torch and extremely heat the metal (burn the paint) then cool it off very fast with water(not dry ice). This again was a old school method and requires repainting to be done. Today’s vehicles are made up with different metals then they were back in the good ol’ days. Most new metals are actually extremely weakened when heated.
Parking In The Sun
For parking in the sun, the reason people tend to think this makes the dents go away is cause they are typically looking at their vehicle in the parking lot. Most dont have anything to compare the damage to except for clouds and the sun, these are the worst conditions to look at a cars panels for dents because you cannot accurately see anything. This is why when looking for damage the best conditions are in a shop setting.
Hopefully this answers any of your do it yourself questions, if you happen to have any other questions or have a dent you need repaired, give us a call:
Here we are walking you through the entire process on how we repair these door dings in this 2018 Audi Q5. This vehicle has only 8k miles on it! The customer originally brought it to us for the dent in the rear door. We gave her an estimate and scheduled the repair a couple weeks later. Later on the vehicle was brought to us for us to do the repair it had actually received another dent in the front door! We were able to do both of these repairs in an afternoon. The customer dropped the vehicle off before work and picked it up dent free after work.
In order to do these repairs we need to gain access to the backside of the damaged areas. We do this by first rolling down the windows of the damaged doors. We then install a stainless steel window guard between the window and the outer sheet metal of the door. This guard protects the window from any type of damage. It also allows us access to the damaged areas of the door without having to remove the door trim panel. We then install an inflatable window wedge in the door channel opening. We then pump it full of air to slowly and safely expand the window opening. From there we install our tools through the top of the window channel and are able to slowly work this metal out and make this dent slowly disappear.
Once the dents are then removed, we then take some extra steps to buff the minor scuffs in the paint from the impact that caused the dents. We then follow that with some rubbing compound and buffing followed by polishing the areas and a final wipe down to clean the panels off. The damage is now completely gone and undetectable, it’s like the damage had never even happened.
These repairs were done quite a while back on a Subaru WRX STI. Both repairs featured here are crease dent removal video clips. We show a mix of techniques including glue pulling, using tools to push the damage out then “blending” the damage out with a specialized dent removal hammer. This customer recently purchased this car. It had multiple dents in it all over the place. He choose us to perform paintless dent repair to remove his damage because the rest of the vehicle and paint was in really great shape. We believe this was a 2004-2005 WRX STI. The car had low mileage and had been cared for very well but it had some minor dents and dings in it all over from normal driving.
Fender Crease Removal
The first dent removal is a crease located in the left side fender. This damage was towards the back of the fender near the door. In order to gain access to the backside of this damage we had to remove part of the plastic fender liner. Once apart of this is removed we are able to get a tool on the backside of this damage. From there we push it out using a soft style tipped tool. Once the damage is mostly out we switch over to a sharper tipped tool. This allows us to pinpoint spots to push up and finish the damage out smooth.
Door Crease Removal
This damage was located in the front section of the right rear door. It being in this location creates one obstacle. This area is heavily braced for strength and rigidity. We start this repair with the glue pull method. Once we pull the damage out with glue we then use a brace style tool to push the damage out. This brace tool is extra thin allowing us to fit it between the bracing structure and exterior door skin. From there we do some minor blending with our blending hammer to smooth it out. Then follow this up with some minor buffing with some rubbing compound to get rid of some minor scuffs from the damage. The damage is then finished and ready to return this now dent free car to a happy customer.
Do you have a crease similar to this in your vehicle? Give us a call to schedule an estimate and your repairs at:
Recently we made some big changes in the shop in the month of May at Sioux Falls Dent Repair. The shop was in need of some repairs. This included some drywall work and painting. We called in some local contractors with C and A Construction to help out with the drywall. Chris and Adam did a great job. They were quick with their work and worked around our busy schedule. Finally it came to the time of needing to close down the shop for all of the final detail work. We then called our friend Dan at Ziegler Paint from the Des Moines area to come up and paint our shop. They were able to come up on a weekend and get the entire place painted in a short time to work with our schedule, it was a great experience!
The shop now is super bright and we can’t wait to put it back together and get back to repairing cars again for our customers!
Stay tuned to see the final setup and the future look of Sioux Falls Dent Repair on any of the following:
Did you know that we also offer our paintless dent repair services to surrounding cities of Sioux Falls. This including Brookings, South Dakota.
Paintless dent repair takes a very specific set of skills to perform correctly. Many shops will say they do paintless dent repair. What this often really that means is they have a technician that does it from time to time. This means their technician might do these style of repairs as little as a time or two a month limiting their skill level. This often allows them to only repair minor damage. This also limits their skill set to smaller quarter sized door dings. Doing paintless dent repair is something that must be done very often. Multiply times a week this must be done in order to hone in the skill set and stay sharp. The other alternative is shops will hire outside companies to do these types of repairs, typically these outside companies do just dent repairs.
What’s the difference?
We here at Sioux Falls Dent Repair we do ONLY paintless dent repair. We don’t have our technicians doing glass repair, detailing, painting, body work and other common skill sets found in a general body shop. While all of these skills are great for a general body shop, having technicians stay sharp on ONE skill and one skill only allows them to do repairs that other “part time techs” cannot. These benefits can be seen in repairs we have done time and time again, you can even see what our customers think of us on their video reviews here.
So next time you are choosing a repair facility be sure to ask specific questions about who is doing your repairs. Be sure to talk with the specific technician doing your actual work and ask them about any questions you might have about your repair.
Ask questions like:
How will the damage be accessed in order to be repaired?
Are they drilling a hole?
What are they doing to prevent corrosion or rust on the backside of the panel after its repaired?
Do they use a cavity wax?
What will they be taking apart to do the repair?
If they are taking your vehicle apart to gain access, will the be performing a Pre and Post Diagnostic scan?
