The vast battleground of the shopping center parking lot is frequently a scene of horror as you return to your nice shiny Mercedes-Benz, only to find that a miscreant has opened their truck door into your fender, or an errant shopping cart has smashed into your door panel, leaving a deep dent in the paintwork. With visions of weeks off the road as a major body panel is removed and stripped of paint to repair the dent, and then the car is put back together again and repainted, you call your insurance company to report an accident that may cost thousands of dollars to repair.
The alternative to expensive body work
But this is not necessarily the fated outcome, as I discovered when the owner of the truck that had been parked next to me in the crowded supermarket parking lot opened his door too quickly and too hard, smashing a deep five-inch dent in my car's front fender, and then left without an apology or contact name.
A friend in the restoration business at our Saturday Cars & Coffee looked at the damage and recommended that I call a local friend of his who has his own one-man paintless dent repair company. It's just him, his tools and his panel van. The next Tuesday he was in my driveway at 9:30 am. He looked at the dent and said, “That’s about an hour and a half work. I should be able to make that dent completely disappear. I can do it right now.” And he quoted me a number equal to the local shop rate for that amount of time.
When I expressed amazement, he explained that Mercedes-Benz and the other high-end luxury manufacturers do a great job of putting the best possible paint on their cars, over resilient high-quality steel. As a consequence, a person with the right tools, training, and experience can repair most of the dents and dings that daily-driver cars may experience. Because the techniques are well-developed, there are a number of different franchises with their own registered trademarks. These franchises train, certify, and equip technicians all over the country.
How paintless dent removal happens
Because the process from beginning to end was so fascinating, and the results so satisfactory, I took the set of pictures shown here.
1. The dent was not pretty, and I really couldn’t bear to keep seeing it every day, but the paint was not cracked and it was in a very accessible part of the paneling.
2. While A.J. the technician was checking for access, he explained that before setting up on his own, he had worked several years for a larger company that did this type of repair for most of the regional auto dealers. When he was done, he gave me his prognosis and very positive estimate of time and cost.
3. With my approval, A.J. then got his rolling stool/tool kit out of his van and spread out his tools: a mallet and some hard-rubber pegs; an electric polisher and polishing cloths; some long metal tools with various kinds of tips; two panels with vertical stripes on them, one that could be fastened to the car, and the other on a stand; and a small jack, which he used to raise the body up so it wouldn’t bounce up and down while he was working.
4. There are some secrets to the process. First, the technician sets up a white panel with black parallel lines so that the lines are reflected across the dent. The goal over the course of the process is to bend the metal back so that the reflected lines are straight. Second, most of the bending work is done by inserting a long tool under the inner panel, down the side of the car inside the door or, very occasionally, drilling a hole in the inner panel to get one of a set of tools with special tips behind the dent and press it out, a little at a time.
5. To smooth the panel on the outside, the technician uses a mallet and a hard-rubber peg to lightly move the metal, relying on the reflection of the parallel lines to check his work. As he moves from one angle to the next, he repositions the target panel so that the lines always cross the dent at right angles to the direction he is moving the metal.
Erasing the dent
Over the next hour or so, A.J. moved back and forth from bending to tapping, often taking a different angle and shifting the target panel to reflect his work. While he worked, he explained that the techniques for him are now so practiced that he feels he is sculpting the metal in a way that seems obvious and natural. He said he can almost feel the metal bending as he works.
However, he said it took him almost six months as an apprentice to even begin to understand and have a feel for the work, working for the franchise trainer at his own expense. The first few months were spent out in junkyards, working on cars that didn’t matter to anyone, so that the mistakes weren’t costly. Then for several months, he worked on customer cars under the direct supervision of a more experienced technician before he was allowed to take on a project himself.
6. After about 90 minutes of work, and a final polish of the whole fender. A.J. asked me if I could see where the dent had been. As carefully as I looked, and even though I had a camera image to prove that there has been a dent in that fender less than two hours earlier, I couldn’t see anything. All for the cost of 1.5 hours of labor. I couldn’t have been more amazed and pleased.
Then A.J. was off to his next job. He was squeezing in several projects in the next few days so he could take his son on a long weekend fishing up on the Rogue River – one of the reasons he works for himself and not for someone else.
