What Is Paintless Dent Removal?
It’s happened to everybody who owns a car. Some anonymous beast nails our car in the parking lot and while we never get the chance to wring their necks, they do leave us with a dent in our car, mementos of the event. Getting these dents out can be a serious hassle for anybody. Messing around with the paint job can be expensive and it’s nigh impossible to match paint colors exact enough not to stick out and look like a sort of automotive Frankenstein monster. Which still leaves you with a big ugly dent and not much that can be done about it. You can try to fix it yourself with home auto tools such as the ubiquitous heat gun, but the fact is, getting a dent out is a seriously difficult job, even for automotive professionals. Still, in this modern age, help is available.
The process of paintless dent removal is a process distinct from mechanical and electric work, being more of an auto body job than a mechanic’s job. It’s a process that takes a lot of specialized equipment and more than a little artistic know how. The first part of paintless dent removal is looking at the dent closely and seeing how the damage lines up with the car’s body. An auto body expert needs sharp eyes and a lot of in the field experience to figure out what the car’s metal should look like rather than what happened to it, and then figuring out the best way to mend the damage. Some of the equipment resembles hooks; these tools are inserted underneath the car’s body and then the professional tugs and pushes the metal, looking at it carefully and lining it up with a specialized light fixture. Sometimes this process requires the use of a powerful heat gun to soften the metal. Of course, going overboard is always a danger in the process, so like all tools, the heat gun is used carefully. Sometimes the process requires a leveler device to get the muscle needed to push the dent out. When metal needs to pushed back into the car, the professional uses a hammer and a set of specialized tools, punches that resemble chisels, save that rather than being intended to break material, they’re meant simply to push it back in. The process requires working from multiple angles and the process is extremely labor intensive and tedious, hence why even automotive professionals prefer to hire others to do it for them. Most specialists in paintless dent removal start out learning what they can and can’t do with metal on discarded car hoods, though since each car is different, they need to relearn it on every job they do.
Paintless dent removal is a long, difficult process, but the results can be stunning. Even the biggest, ugliest dent can be made to disappear as if they were ordinary mud stains if enough time and effort is expended on them. And, when your car is looking its best, unmarred and glorious, so are you.
