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| Every dent is different. This time Jeff used a rubber mallet to do the final tweaking |
If you are into cars, it's inevitable that your nice shiny new ride will accumulate its share of ugly and annoying dents and dings no matter how careful you are when parking. Even the stored garage queen is not immune to this sort of damage. Some of you have kids, some have crowded garages full of stuff that falls over. Some of you have spouses or SO's that think your obsession with cars is dumb and park the car any old where when you are not around. Needless to say, all cars no matter how trick or how well cared for accumulate dings.
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| This device provides a high contrast reference plane that makes it easier to spot dings and minute flaws in the reflections of the vehicles surface. It doesn’t show well in pictures but it really helps make dings jump out at you. |
These long handled tools in many lengths and shapes are used to help push out dings and to reach deeply recessed parts of the cars bodies |
I am exceedingly careful, I always look for the end spot, don't park next to unkempt cars, coach my daughter to be careful around the cars but they still get dings. Lately my cars have really gotten clobbered. Project EVO had about 5 good ones that it got while taking up space at a crowded shop, my G35 had two deep ones that door swinging SOB's gave it in parking lots, my 200SX SE-R got four good ones while on loan as an R&D project and during a collision by a neighbor's kid on a bike. To top it all off, my brand new 2006 Pathfinder got a couple from a neighbor leaning on it hard while hanging out.
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| Jeff used this tool on or G35’s door dings. The odd bends on the shaft help reach over lock rods and door intrusion beams |
The rounded tip of the tool is the part that does the work of pushing out the dent |
Jeff uses a plastic wedge, the same one that the AAA guy uses to slim jim your door to spread the upper part of the door enough to fit his tools into. |
All these dents accumulating on some of my cleanest cars in such a short time was quite vexing and somewhat unusual for me as I am rather anal and have a well trained family. In the old days fixing a ding was not an easy proposition. The ding would be pounded out then the remaining flaws would be covered with body filler and sanded. Finally the repaired area would be primed and painted. This method required nearly the same effort as fixing a bigger dent, and necessitated painting an entire panel. This is not good, refinish paint is usually not as good as the baked on factory paint and rarely matches perfectly. Often a botched repair would look worse than the ding. In any case you had to be very picky to even want to try to fix a ding because the repair costs would be nearly has high as repairing more major damage.
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As he pushed on the backside of the dent, he sights down the body and uses the sight plain tool to judge how and where to push |
Pushing stretches the metal slightly and can make an out bump. Jeff uses this delrin plastic punch that won’t mar the paint with light taps with a mallet handle and technique to shrink the metal back into a perfect surface. Bye bye ding |
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| The sight device on Project EVO |
