Paintless Dent Repair
So you've got a small dent or ding in your car, how do you get it out? Well, three little letters... P-D-R... that's paintless dent repair. A skilled technician can repair dings and dents without a trace. We get a lot of questions here at Goss' Garage about PDR, and joinnig us to share some pointers is Mr. Bob McConkey from DentBusters. Welcome to Goss’ Garage.
BOB MCCONKEY: Thank you, Pat. It’s nice to be here.
PAT GOSS: Alright, PDR, what does it mean?
BOB MCCONKEY: PDR is paintless dent repair, and paintless dent repair really is considered an art of removing small dents and dings in cars without doing any paint or sanding or refinishing of the upper surface.
PAT GOSS: Okay. Now, you do that with specialized tools…
BOB MCCONKEY: Absolutely.
PAT GOSS: ...but it’s a lot more involved than the tools themselves.
BOB MCCONKEY: Right.
PAT GOSS: It’s like this. I mean, in my hands, I’d be a hazard.
BOB MCCONKEY: Probably so. But what we have to do is we have to go beneath the surface. This reflector board lets me see the actual surface that I’m working on. And when you start massaging from the inside with this, the dent will actually disappear.
PAT GOSS: And that’s a good word, massaging is actually what you do. There’s nothing that’s dramatic, you just gently work the dent out.
BOB MCCONKEY: A lot of finesse.
PAT GOSS: Finesse. Okay. Well, that brings up another point, and that is that if you watch late night television or go on the Internet there’s all kinds of do-it-yourself kits for PDR.
BOB MCCONKEY: You want to stay away from those because those are gimmicks. There’s no way that you can do what we do with our process with a glue gun.
PAT GOSS: Okay, so the majority of this is not in the tools, it’s in the operator’s hands and how skilled they are…
BOB MCCONKEY: Absolutely.
PAT GOSS: ...is what’s going to control the outcome?
BOB MCCONKEY: Yeah, you have to have some pretty intensive training to master this technique. A lot of people have tried it and haven’t been able to do it, so you want to make sure that you find somebody that’s really capable of doing the work properly.
PAT GOSS: Okay. Now how do find that special somebody that can do it right?
BOB MCCONKEY: Well, there’s the Internet, of course, which everybody uses. And if you can’t find anybody in your area you can always call your local car dealer that you bought your car from and he will definitely have somebody that does PDR for him.
PAT GOSS: Yeah, because ALL car dealers use this process.
BOB MCCONKEY: Absolutely. They must.
PAT GOSS: Okay. Well, Bob, thank you so very much.
BOB MCCONKEY: Thank you, Pat.
If you have a question or comment, write to me.
The address is MotorWeek, Owings Mills, MD, 21117.