Remove Different Types of Car Dents
From bicycles to baseballs, all types of items have the potential to dent a car or truck. As the owner of Precision Dent Removal, Chris Parsons has more than 14 years of experience performing paintless dent removal on all types of cars and trucks in the Virginia Beach and Hamptons Road areas. And according to him, there are certain hazards hed advise anyone with a car to avoid.
Tiny and Round Dents
In my experience, a few of the most common causes of vehicle dents are car doors hitting other car doors, kids on bicycles running into the sides of parked cars, and cars rubbing against the sides of other cars during bad parking jobs. Fortunately, a lot of these types of dents also happen to be the easiest to get out. Small, round dents that happen to show up in the middle of car doors are usually the easiest to remove, since its less likely that any paint was damaged during the initial accident.
Many clients coming in for dent repair jobs in Virginia Beach need help fixing the tiny, round dents that can appear on the hood of a car after a big hailstorm. Hail can easily damage a car, but we can fix that type of thing with our paintless dent removal service. Stray balls from sports including golf, tennis, baseball, and basketball have all been known to cause dents in cars. As with hail dents, however, these types of dings are usually small and shallow enough to be repaired without much effort or cost.
Deep Crease-Type Dents
On the other hand, the toughest types of dents to get out of a vehicle are the crease-type ones that are located on the edge of the door or trunk. Anytime you see a dent that is deep, that means the metal has been scored and stretched. In such cases, the metal has usually lost most of its memory, so its nearly impossible to get it back into the proper location without a lot of work. These types of dents are more likely to be caused by a major auto accident or collision, as opposed to minor run ins with baseballs or bikes.
Metal memory comes up quite a bit in our line of work. Each vehicle has its own metal memory - a sort of stamp that will stay with it from beginning to end. From the time when a car is being made on the factory line, the manufacturers technicians are forming the metal that will make up the car and putting body lines in it. They are doing this at a high temperature, which allows them to essentially create the vehicles metal memory.
When a driver gets into an accident that causes a dent along a vehicles bodyline, it can potentially crease the metal so much that it no longer retains its own metal memory. In order to get that metal vehicle body to go back into its original shape, dent removal specialists on the job will have to do a lot of extra work using their special paintless dent removal tools.
Whenever a vehicles metal has been creased, that means it has been scored as well. And once a piece of metal has been scored and stretched in a new way, it no longer wants to go back to its old shape. It just takes a lot more work to get a vehicle with a major crease to go back to its original shape when you compare that type of job with the work it takes to fix a small ding from a shopping cart or golf ball.
Too Big Dents
In Virginia Beach, I occasionally encounter a vehicle needing dent repair work that is just too extensive for my company to handle. If the dent is too big for us to fix, then I will call our mobile paint unit. First, I will push the large part of the dent out, and then the guys from the mobile paint unit will come over to fill in and paint the rest. Beyond that, there isnt much we can do. When someone calls me asking what to do with a vehicle that has damage covering more than two panels-meaning more than two doors, or more than two quarter panels-I will advise the vehicle owner to head to a body shop. If there is too much paint gone or if the job is just too big, then visiting a body shop is going to be a persons best course of action.
Chris Parsons is a writer for Yodle, a business directory and online advertising company. Find an auto body shop or more
