Paintless dent repair, PDR: Hailstorm damage is a car owner’s worst nightmare and can easily be avoided with a few cautionary steps: try to park your car in a shaded or covered area, especially during seasons when hailstorms are prevalent. If you’re going to be going out of town for an extended amount of time, make sure that your car is parked in an enclosed area and, if possible, have someone check on it once in a while. Open spaces will leave your car helpless against the wrath of this natural phenomenon.
First let’s start with some car paint care recommendations: If you can not expose your car to the sunlight, you can use a hair dryer instead. Just aim the hair dryer to the areas you want to fix, and wait until the dents even out. The ideal distance between the hair dryer and the car should be 2-4 inches. While using a hair dryer, there should be an interval of 2 minutes. If the car’s paint starts discoloring, you should stop applying heat right away. Use a rubbing compound or wax to revise the paint color.
I don’t care if you wash your car yourself (more on that strategy later in this page) or you take it to a quality car wash. (Yes, not all car washes are created equal) This is not an option as dirt is your #1 enemy when it comes to the finish on your new car paint. And this doesn’t mean once every 6 months whether it needs it or not. This means regularly and consistently. (A minimum of once a month…minimum!)
Only three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and getting a dent in your car or truck. Even if you’re as careful as possible, you can’t always account for runaway shopping carts, wrongly thrown footballs, out-of-nowhere light posts, and other real-life annoyances. However you got your dent or ding, the next thing on your mind is, undoubtedly, how to get it out. Sure, you can take it to a body shop or friendly neighborhood mechanic for repair, but their price quotes can be unbelievable, especially if they want to remove the paint first or use body filler. $200 for that tiny dent?! I don’t think so.
Clay: You could also obtain a better finish and a prominent shine if you use good quality clay. Before the clay is applied to the surface, make sure the car is cleaned with paint cleaner. Always remember to use the right applicator pad or a soft terry towel when working on the car’s exterior, to avoid scratching the vehicle. If you don’t know how to use detailing products or clay on your car, view online tutorials and easy do-it-yourself guides to complete the task easily. See additional info on Automotive Repair & Customization in Colorado Springs.
If you are interested in learning how to do paintless dent repair, make sure that you take the time to gather the right tools and supplies, learn about the detailed process of PDR, and then spend time practicing your own repair techniques on metal panels from the local junk yard before you start doing repairs on your own vehicles.
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.