Some tips for automotive hail repair tasks

Several recommendations for vehicle wraps & decals tasks? 1st let’s start with some car paint care tips: For small dents on your car hood, a car dent repair kit may be a simple and inexpensive solution. You can easily find these kits at any local auto supply store and they are very user-friendly. Each kit often includes a knockdown tool, a glue gun and many stems for different sized dents. You may be surprised at the way the kit works and the professional result it makes. But we do recommend this kid for small dents only. For deep, large dents, it is better if you take your car to garage as the repair kit can not fix them and even cause more damage.

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.

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.

Don’t underestimate the necessary step of decontamination prior to application of your chosen wax. If you fail to do this step, you will get disappointing results regardless of the type of wax you have chosen. And yes…even that brand new car straight off the dealer lot will in have some form of pollutants already on the car paint from its travel from the factory to the car dealership. Clear coat is the top layer of your cars paint. It acts as a protective layer to filter out UV rays. But your clear coat is what you are trying to take care of with the above requirements. People get confused about clear coat vs. car paint. Virtually every car today is finished with a clear coat as the top layer. Think of it as car paint with no color added to it.

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. Read additional info on Auto Decals & Lettering Colorado Springs.

Undercoating: Although waxing the car and polishing it produces good results, you need to protect the car from long term damage by undercoating and rust-proofing it. When the car metal is oxidized, rust sets in and destroys the surface of the car. To avoid this, you should consider rust-proofing the vehicle, particularly if you reside in a state where the humidity is high.

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.