Hot Glue Dent Repair

Get ready to be glued to your seats; Dan Maffett stopped by to show us how one simple tool can make dent repairs a cinch on MotorWeek’s “Your Drive!”

DAN MAFFETT: The world of dent repair has come a long way. It used to be, if you had a dent like this, you had to strip it to metal, weld on studs that allowed you to lock on a slide hammer like this, and then literally reverse hammer that panel flat. Now, that wasn’t the end of it. Once you got that out, you had to go back in with a hammer and dolly like this, find the right shape for that panel, and work the metal in and out, stretching it and shrinking it until you got to the panel shape that you wanted. But, that wasn’t the end of it either. Once you were done doing that, you then had to bodywork and paint that panel.

Now, that was out of reach for most DIY guys. But now, we’ve got a lot of options. Now, there’s some cheaper ones like this based on suction cups that are just not worth the time. Now, this kit here is a paintless dent repair kit. What it does is it has these various shapes. You find the shape that matches the dent you’re trying to repair, and you actually use a hot glue polymer in there and it locks it in place. Once that’s in, you can use various tools that they have. This one is a clamp. Once it locks in, you simply pop it out. They also make a slide hammer attachment, so a little reminiscent of the old days, but you lock that on, pop it out and then you’re able to get a flatter surface, pull that dent out, without as much work. Now, we’re going to pick the best adapter here, get some glue on there, and see if we can pull this dent.

Now once the glue has started to change a little colors, and it’s cool to the touch, you know it’s cured and it’s ready to be pulled. So, we’re going to take this guy… going to adjust it down so that both feet are firmly against the panel. So right there, it’s locked against the panel, there’s no slack, and then we’ll just do a pull.

And you see we got most of those dents out. The big circle dent that was there is gone. We just have a few tiny pinpoints there that we need to work with. So, this design of paintless dent is not going to get every little dent out of there, but it’s going to get the big dents out, it’s going to flatten it and save you a lot of money from a body shop.

So, this one is now cured, we’re going to try to pull that last little bit of dent out of there. Again, just lock it down…and give it a pull.

So now that we’ve got that dent pulled out almost all the way, you can now buff it, clean it up, and most people won’t ever notice that dent was ever there. So, with the technology becoming way more affordable and easier to do it yourself, you have no excuse to live with a dent.

If you have any questions or comments, hit us up right here, at MotorWeek.