What paintless dent removal
can do for larger dents

Paintless dent removal is really best on small dents no larger than a 50p, it can be used on dents that are larger but the results can be mixed! - it all depends on things like the thickness of the bodywork and the position of the dent.

The problem is that you can never get dents perfect... they just look perfect! Here is what happens when a panel gets dented.

If you look carefully you can see that the panel has become stretched. The shortest distance between point 'A' and point 'B' is a straight line, so the fact that the metal is now in a curve means that it HAS to be longer than the area you want to push it back into. The extra length has to go somewhere because unfortunately, you cannot shrink it back.

So what happens is that when you push it back you actually get a ripple in the metal - this is shown in the diagram above. Both these diagrams are heavily exaggerated and on the real thing you wouldn't notice the ripple because it would be too slight and would be hidden by the ripple that is on the cars paintwork commonly known as orange peel.

Orange peel is the name given to the rippled texture effect on car paintwork. When a panel is painted the paint doesn't lay totally smooth - this ripple could be removed but if the car was given a totally flat glass-like finish it would show every imperfection. (It isn't usually as pronounced as the picture but that is because this is a poor quality respray).

The larger the dent is, the more the panel gets stretched - so the less likely it is that the dent can be totally removed - we can usually make an improvement, but this will also depend on conditions. We do say on our dent pages that we can only remove a dent if it doesn't cross a swage line, if the dent doesn't form a crease, and if the paintwork is un broken... this leads to many people sending us dents that meet this criteria, but are too sever for us to do, or we can only make an improvement on. If we can make an improvement, we need to make a judgment as to how much of an improvement we can make which is a matter of experience, and make a judgment as to 'an improvement' will suite the car - obviously an improvement isn't good enough on the bonnet of a 2 year old Mercedes, but it may be good enough if it is a 7 year old Ford and the dent is some place less obvious such as below knee height.

The picture above shows Mike contemplating a large dent on the wing of a Vauxhall Corsa. The cross section diagrams at the beginning of this article show the problem of how the panel stretches -- but thats just in two dimensions, body panels are rarely flat, they are designed to be curved to build strength into the car. Imagine taking a cardboard tube and bending it, there is a lot of resistance... this isn't because of the strength of the cardboard but because of the shape. When a curved section like this comes under pressure it doesn't just roll inside out, it resists until a certain point can no longer take the strain and snaps back. In the case of this dent it appears to have happened at the top. Dents don't just go inward, they also fold outward giving high spots. Try bending that cardboard tube - you will see that at the edge of the bend you get a crease that pops out. Unlike cardboard the metal on a car will also stretch.

So we know before we start that we will never be able to remove this dent fully. However, this is an old car and it's value is really as a run-about, or as a first car for somebody who has just passed their test.

When the car is finished there is undoubtedly a vast improvement - we aim for a 70% or more improvement on most of the larger dents. Many dent repair men won't attempt a dent if they don't think they can get it perfect because they don't charge unless they have got perfection. But we realize that sometimes on cheaper cars an improvement is good enough, especially when the alternative is an expensive bodyshop repair which might cost half the value of what the car is worth! We have a guarantee which applies to all dents which is that if we can't get a 70% improvement we won't charge you, if we do get a 70% improvement but you feel you just can't live without perfection, then if within 30 days you go to a body shop and get the panel repaired, we will refund the cost of the dent.

Our measure of what a 70% improvement is if you stand twelve feet away, straight on, you should barely be able to see the repair. In the case of this Corsa, the photo above was taken from about seven feet away and it wasn't taken straight on... this is because there is a Police Panda-Car in the way, in fact, the stripes on the police car are doing us no favours at all as they really give a measure of the imperfections. In this case we estimated that the car just about scraped through the 70% mark. The customer was very happy with the work and said that it was better than she expected.

The photo above shows the repair from a particularly unkind angle. The ripples you can see are where the top of the dent was - this is the area most damaged and it was fairly badly creased - certainly teetering over the edge of what we would normally attempt.

In the words of Chuck Berry - You never can tell. It turned out that the metalwork on this car was particularly difficult. Sometimes they can just pop out, to the surprise of even the experienced dent men, but this one was really difficult. Mike could have worked on this dent longer and maybe got some more of those ripples out... but to do so would risk the paintwork cracking or flaking off which would require a bodyshop repair. I should also point out that access to this dent was also pretty difficult and involved removing the wheel arch and and the wing liners.

So what is the alternative to a dent repair? We got a estimate from Dave at Kraftwork. His assessment was that most bodyshops would charge between £125 and £150 just to paint the wing - if they had to blend into other panels which you would almost certainly have to do on metallic colours it would cost between £200 and £250. However, he told us that most panel beaters wouldn't risk using this wing. They are able to be a bit more rough with panels than dent men because they don't have to worry about cracking the paint, but still suffer from all the same problems of access. So rather than risk not getting the repair quite right, most would opt for replacing the wing which would probably mean an additional cost of about £80 to £100. Ian from M&J rice Bodyworks told me more about this - a pattern wing (as opposed to a Vauxhall part) would only be about £20 for a Corsa, but replacing a wing is another matter all together... to fit it you will have to remove the bumper and possibly the front door. If it's bolted on it's fairly easy but if the wings are welded on then its a whole other matter. So costs can vary greatly from car to car for replacing a wing... it may be the case that they can repaint it and then bolt it on, but it may require major engineering!

Most of the time we charge £60+vat for a dent but for some difficult dents like this one, we charge £100-£120+vat which allows us to spend more time on it, but the normal rules still apply - if we can't get the promised improvement, we don't charge.

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