2021 BMW 3 Series
When a customer calls me and says they have a “small dent” I’m not quite sure what they mean. “Small” is such a subjective term, and it can mean anything from a dime sized door ding to a minor collision. In the dent repair industry we try our best to use objective measurable terms when we talk about paintless dent repair, especially when writing estimates. Objective terms like “4 inches, vertical crease, steel panel, on a body line” or anything in the realm of measurable are what we shoot for. That being said, there are often times when a dent appears “small” or at least smaller than it actually is.
I recently had the opportunity to repair a “small” door ding on a white 2021 BMW 330. Even when I looked at the dent I thought it looked to be about the size of a quarter, but the vehicle was white and white paint tends to hide a lot (and so does silver for what that’s worth.) What happens with light colors of paint is the natural light of the sun tends to flood the dent making it difficult to see in it’s entirety of even at all. So to get a better look at this dent I knew I had to do two things; I needed to move the car into a position where the damaged panel (in this case the passenger rear door) was on the shaded side of the vehicle, and I needed to examine the dent under a Paintless Dent Repair light. As you can see from the photo on the cover of this post the dent was not the size of a quarter (an inch.) The dent was actually a three inch vertical crease, and it had more depth to it than I initially thought as well. My paintless dent repair light works by casting a reflection in the clear coat of the vehicle, and that light has straight lines on it so that if the panel reflecting it is straight the lines in the reflection will be straight as well. Wherever the lines bow out we know the metal is low (dented) and wherever the lines pinch together we know the metal is high (crowned.) In this case the lines in the reflection of the light showed me details of the dent that couldn’t be seen by the human eye in natural light and it impacted to cost of the repair.
I can’t stress enough how much that size difference matters, and how much the dent having a defined crease at its’ center impacts the difficulty of the repair. And logically it makes sense that a three inch crease is more difficult to repair than a one inch shallow dent. If we continue that logic, a dent that has a higher degree of difficulty should cost more than to repair than a smaller dent with less difficulty.
To repair this dent it was relatively straight forward. We used our window wedge and window guard to create some separation between the glass and the outer skin of the door which allowed us to slip a tool inside of the door to push the dent out from the backside of the door skin. I chose to use a double bend tool from dent magic tools to do the repair, which is a pretty standard go to style of paintless dent repair rod for door repairs. All in all the repair turned out great, check out the photo below.
You can also check out a full video breakdown of this dent repair here on my YouTube page.
