11 Year Old Beetle Repair
A client recently reached out to me with a bit of an issue- while his wife was out of town he dropped a luggage bag on the fender of her beloved Volkswagen Beetle. The client was getting his golf clubs out of the attic in his garage and normally he pulls the vehicles out of the garage to be safe but this time he was careless and it lead to a luggage carrier putting a fairly large dent in his wife’s fender. The client wasn’t just looking for a good repair, he was looking for a perfect repair, and it needed to be done before she returned from her trip.
I had to move a few things around, but I had a three day window to fit this vehicle into my schedule. This wasn’t the first time I came across a dent caused by. a luggage bag falling out of an attic (check out my YouTube page to see the BMW I repaired this year) and I knew the damage would require a fair amount of time to repair properly. When metal is hit hard there’s typically a fair amount of metal that gets pushed high in addition to the low we recognize as the dent. Similar to throwing a rock into a pond, when something hits metal energy ripples through the area, but the resistance of the metal doesn’t allow this energy to disperse and it leaves a high spot in a curved pattern. Thats what we call the crown. I knew that this dent would require me to lift the low spot (the dent) but also knock down the crowns. I’d switch between pulling, pushing, and blending the crowns.
I chose to start this repair with cold glue and a slide hammer. Glexo makes a product that is similar to putty, and when used properly it can pull a large amount of metal quickly. I began by pulling the dent at the impact point which a presumed to be at the top of the fender, and then I gave it one more pull towards the bottom. The bulk of the dent was up and the crowns began to reveal themselves, and so I grabbed my blending hammer and knock downs. The real work was about to begin.
From this point it was simply a game of back and forth between pushing and knocking down. I chose to approach my pushes using my dentcraft double bend with a cherry red R4 tip. The fender was soft and malleable, so I wanted to make sure my pushes were as gentle and broad as possible to reduce the chances of chewing the metal or leaving texture in it. Finishing a dent is all about getting the texture right, it has to match the natural texture of the vehicles paint, and in this case my client never wanted his wife to know the dent was there. So we took a slow, steady, gentle approach to achieve the results he was looking for. As you can see the client got exactly what he was looking for.
If you’d like to see a video of this repair this link will take you to my YouTube page!
