Paintless dent repair, PDR complete guides

Customize my ride tips: 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.

In the first place let’s begin with some car paint care tips: 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.

Wax Your Car: Yes, I think it is accepted knowledge that your car needs to be waxed on a regular basis. If you have just bought a new car from a dealership, you must realize that no new car comes with wax from the manufacturer or dealer. New car prep does not mean the dealership is going to wax your car either. So that new car paint of yours is like taking a new-born child out in the sun with no sunblock on their skin. You can review my selection of best car waxes in helping you choose a quality car wax. Just remember your car should be waxed every 4-6 months under “normal” conditions. If you live in extreme weather conditions and you plan on keeping your car for over 5 years, you might consider applying wax to that new car paint even more frequently.

Instead, save yourself some of that hard-earned money and do it yourself. There are plenty of ways to get a small dent or ding out of a vehicle at home without ruining your paint, and you don’t need to be a gearhead to do it. However, not all of these tricks will work on your particular automobile; your mileage may vary depending on where the dent is and what your body panel, hood, or bumper is made of (aluminum, carbon fiber, plastic, fiberglass, steel, etc.). For instance, aluminum has little memory properties, so paintless dent removal is much more difficult.

Using the Right Wax. Since each type of paint reacts differently to wax and polish, you need to find out which paint was used on your car and purchase detailing products that suit the paint. Some products may act as abrasive agents and strip the car off its original shine. Discover extra info on Automotive Repair & Customization in Colorado Springs.

PDR is a specialized form of autobody repair where technicians use special tools and techniques to slowly reduce a dent down in size until it completely disappears. PDR is a learned skill. Through trial and error, technicians gradually begin to understand the specific areas of a dent to manipulate, exactly how to manipulate certain locations of a dent, and the specialized processes and technologies used to remove a dent without the need to repaint the area.

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.