The complete guide to Paintless Dent Removal (PDR) - Part 2

Common causes of minor dents suitable for PDR

By far the most common dent we see is the ‘DOOR DING’, there are many reasons why we see more of these than all other dents put together, firstly, modern car body panels are much thinner than they used to be, to help with weight reduction and in turn improve mpg, this means that even the slightest tap with another car door can cause a dent, the harder the impact, the bigger the dent will be.

Added to this cars have increased in size over the last few decades, think about a classic 1960’s mini parked next to a modern one, worse still the average modern car is not a mini, we’ve moved much more towards family orientated people carriers or SUV’s if you want to be all US of A about it and the extremely popular Chelsea tractor or more specifically a 4x4 body with 2 wheel drive, these can be huge in comparison with the most popular cars of the 70’s,80’s 90’s like the Cortina, Cavalier, Focus, Vectra etc.  

So modern vehicles are much larger and much thinner than they’ve ever been but it doesn’t end there, in the past shopping areas were often High street centric with cars parked along the side of the road (not next to each other) to make matters worse, as developers designed and built new out of town shopping centres and retail parks the need to maximise the number of spaces was always going to win over the ability to open the doors with plenty of room to avoid accidents.

The term ‘DOOR DING’ is a generic description of a small dent, usually less than 40mm in diameter, most commonly caused by other car doors and these are normally found in car doors wings and quarter panels.

Hailstone damage

We have been repairing hailstone damage for the last 30 years, until quite recently that work has been carried out predominantly in Northern Europe, we’ve travelled to many parts of Germany, Austria, Italy and France and spent months repairing the damage caused by severe weather.

Large hailstones (Big enough to damage a vehicles body panels) happen when warm air meets cold air in the upper atmosphere and can vary in ferocity from a short blast of baked bean sized hailstones to a prolonged and violent storm with hailstones larger than cricket balls, these larger hailstones begin as small ones but are thrown around so violently that they group together to form a large spikey mass that can cause huge damage to buildings, cars and livestock. 

The damage to vehicles can be anything from a handful of pea sized dents to thousands of fist sized dents that can smash through windscreens and embed themselves in the dashboard. Its normal for us to repair anywhere from 100 to 1000 dents ranging in diameter from 5mm to 100mm, many of these dents can have sharp centres from the larger spikey hail and can cover all panels but it’s the flat panels like roofs, bonnets and boots that take the brunt of the damage and there’s usually one side damaged far worse than the other as hailstones often fall diagonally.

Many vehicle manufacturers opt for PDR repairs to repair damage to speed up the process and avoid unnecessary paintwork. Due to climate change we are seeing more and more of this type of damage caused here in the UK, our severe storms usually track up the centre of the country close to the M1 and most damage is usually between Oxford and Sheffield.

Balls and other flying objects.

We often receive enquiries from our customers when their car has been hit by a golf ball, a cricket ball or a football, they can all cause damage to modern body panels but by far the biggest issue is golf balls as footballs are much softer and cricket is usually very civilised without too many cars at close range. Golf ball damage in most cases is repairable by paintless dent removal so there’s no need to worry too much about lengthy and costly repairs at your local bodyshop. 

We also get quite a few enquiries where someone has had apples, pears, branches and even conkers fall onto their car whilst parked beneath a tree, these can be quickly and efficiently repaired using PDR without having to claim on your insurance and increasing next year’s premium.

Where can PDR be used on a car body

There are two basic methods of PDR, Push and Pull.  

The push method is probably the most well-known and the most used, it requires specialist tooling to access the rear of the damage and the damage is slowly massaged (pushed) back to its original shape.

The pull method can be used when there’s little or no access to the rear of the panel and can also be useful to lift larger areas faster and cleaner than pushing from behind. It requires that specialist hot glue is applied to a tab and the tab is stuck to the outside of the body panel and the pulled forwards to lift the damaged area. When you can use either or both methods almost all areas of a cars metal bodywork can be repaired by PDR.

Paintless Dent repair on car bonnets.

Car bonnets are now almost always steel or aluminium and can be damaged by many things either whilst the car is being driven or whilst it’s stationary, if the paintwork isn’t damaged, and the basic structure hasn’t been deformed we can often repair the damage.

We remove the sound deadener that’s usually attached with trim clips, and this allows us access to the underside of the bonnet, there can often be strengthening braces to navigate particularly towards the front latch area, We use specialist tools to gain access to these areas through small holes and slots in the frame structure to massage the damage back to its original shape, if all else fails we can often repair car bonnets with glue pull methods.

PDR can be used to repair car and van doors

Like bonnets as long as the basic structure isn’t deformed, we can repair a wide variety of damage in vehicle doors, we access the damage in a number of different ways.

Most commonly we would access the rear of the door skin by lowering the window, placing a metal or plastic glass protector between the glass and door skin and open the gap between the two by gently inserting plastic or inflatable wedges to allow access to the inside of the door with our specialist tooling, we can often access rear doors by removal of the wiring loom from the grommet at the front edge of the door and in some cases we can remove the door trim to gain access to the inside of the door, we then lever and massage the damage back to its former position.

For more information on Paintless Dent Removal, watch out for upcoming articles and if you missed Part 1, you can find it here.

To find out more about how much Paintless Dent Repair costs visit our dent repair price guide page or should you need a Dent Repair Specialist near you, get a quote today.