2015 Volkswagen Fender Smash
A customer bumped into a pole with their 2015 Volkswagen Passat and called me to fix it. This repair was one of the more challenging dents that I have repaired, and I knew it would push my limits as a technician. Even small collisions are collisions, and even at low speeds the weight of an automobile coming in contact with something is going to cause significant damage. On top of that, fenders are generally one of the weaker and more malleable panels on most vehicles. And just looking at the size, depth, and shape of this dent I could tell that it wouldn’t be an easy repair.
The shape, location, and depth of the damage on this fender all contribute to how complicated repairing it would be. The metal above the natural body line was pushed up to create what we call a “crown” and the body line was completely pushed in. The result of those two things together meant that the metal was under heavy pressure and would be difficult to move without damaging the paint. In order to fix this dent I had to do a dance (so to speak) of pushing some of the dent out, and then knocking down the crown, push a low spot, tap the crown, repeat, repeat, repeat. I chose to use a VIP knockdown as well as a blending hammer from KECO to reduce the crown, and the bulk of the metal was pushed with a double bend tool with a soft tip on the end. Blending hammers are specifically made for knocking down high spots and crowns on damage like this and have polished stainless steel heads to prevent damaging the brace. Even with this special hammer a technician has to use it properly to avoid putting a bunch of smaller dents in and around the already existing damage. Once you find the right tapping pressure and speed a blending hammer is excellent and smoothing out the bulk of a crown quickly and getting the panel ready for more traditional knock down methods. After using the blending hammer to take care of the bulk of the damage I did end up switching to a nylon tipped knock down and rubber mallet to clean up the finer points of the crown, all while balancing my “push, tap, repeat dance.
When pushing I found that the soft tip worked very well for moving large amounts of metal on this panel. When working on bigger damage you want to use a broader tip to push and avoid creating hundreds of high spots, And a broad soft tip will get the general shape of the panel back quickly without the risk of cracking paint but it isn’t effective when finishing a dent repair. When it was time to finish the repair I used another double bend tool with a sharp tip on it for those finer details and clean up work. These double bend tools have become my absolute go to for paintless dent repair and I use them every chance I get. Check out the photo below to see how great the results are.
Here was our final product. I was very happy with how this repair turned out and so was the customer. If you are interested in watching a video of this repair click the YouTube link below.
YouTube
