2 BIG Reasons To Avoid DIY Dent Repair On Your Damaged Vehicle
Posted on: 31 August 2016
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Take one trip across YouTube or any automotive repair forum and you will find all kinds of friendly advice and tutorials about how you can simply pop out a dent in your vehicle's body and avoid an auto body shop altogether. However, if there is one downfall to the ready availability of so much information online, it is the fact that it can contribute to a false sense of confidence at attempting something you have never tried before. If you have a major dent in your vehicle, there are two reasons why it is best to just leave the dent-pulling to the professionals at an auto body repair shop.
It often takes a trained eye to see the true extent of the damage.
It may look like just a dent, but if the dent is deep enough, there is a good chance that the paint and topcoat on your car's painted surface is also damaged. Even the tiniest cracks can allow abrasives like road salt and moisture to reach the underlying metal, and this can easily cause rust over time. Even if you do successfully pull the dent out and your car looks as good as new, there may be a bigger issue at play that you cannot see.
At an auto body repair shop, they will pull the dent out, but if there is even the tiniest bit of surface damage to the paint, the professionals will take the time to sand, primer, and repaint the area. This is a time-consuming process for you, but not so much by a professional who already has all of the necessary tools and equipment.
It is all too easy to create an even bigger section of damage without experience.
In some cases, knocking out a basic, small dent is no big deal, but this is actually quite the rare event. More often than not, the process of pulling a dent back into place is a lot more complicated than it looks, especially with metal body vehicles.
Just the act of trying to push the dent out to its original place can create more damage, either to the panel of the vehicle's body you are working on or the paint. Therefore, you could easily have a bit of damage which could be handled easily by a professional, but if you mess with it too much, you could create a bigger, more costly issue.