Watched a guy at a swap meet in Reno fix a dent with a heat gun and a can of air, changed my whole approach to hail damage | Auto Body Repairers - Opinions Matter
Watched a guy at a swap meet in Reno fix a dent with a heat gun and a can of air, changed my whole approach to hail damage
So about four months back I was at this swap meet in Reno looking for a used fender for a customer's Civic, and there's this older guy with a little booth set up doing dent removal demos on a beat up hood he brought with him. I stood there for maybe twenty minutes watching him work. He'd heat the dent with a cheap heat gun, then flip a can of compressed air upside down and hit it with the cold blast, and the thing would pop right out, no drilling, no glue puller, nothing. I'd been doing glue pulling and rod work on hail cars for ages and always figured that method was a myth or only worked on plastic bumpers. He let me try it on a small crease and it came out cleaner than some of my push to paint jobs, I'm not even kidding. I went home and tried it on a quarter panel dent the next week and while it didn't work on the sharp stuff, it handled the softer hail dings way faster than glue pulling. Your mileage may vary depending on the metal and how stretched it is, and I still use rods for anything creased, but for light stuff it's cut my time down a lot. Anybody else mess with the heat and cold trick, or is it just a parlor game that only works on certain panels?