Mercedes Benz Shop Manual

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January 16th, 2010 admin Leave a comment Go to comments

mercedes benz shop manual

The Method of Paintless Dent Removal

As the owner of Precision Dent Removal, Chris Parsons has more than 14 years of experience performing paintless dent removal on all types of cars and trucks in the Virginia Beach. And according to him, paintless dent removal is the perfect repair option for anyone with a small- to medium-size dent in his car that he'd like to have taken out.

The concept of paintless dent repair has been around for nearly 25 years. It was supposedly started by a technician working at the Mercedes Benz factory. As legends go, it is said that the Mercedes Benz worker was tired of having to waste time fixing the vehicles on the product line that had been dented during production, since the putty and repainting process slowed the manufacturing line. So, the technician figured out a way to push the dents in the car panels back out without needing any special repairs or paints. And the concept of paintless dent repair was born.

Benefits

Thanks to the option of paintless dent removal, having a dent removed from a car door or hood doesn't have to mean spending thousands of dollars getting the ding filled in and the car repainted. My company specializes in dent repair for car owners in Virginia Beach, so I have seen a lot of vehicles that have been damaged by rocks, stray golf balls, or even hail storms. A large percentage of the vehicles I see each month could benefit from paintless dent removal, as opposed to the older method of removing a dent, which means using putty to fill in the dented area and trying to match the paint to the car exactly.

When you take a car to a body shop and have putty put in to fill the dent, the negative is that no body shop is going to be able to perfectly match the manufacturer's paint on your car. In addition, the paint that they do use is more likely to fade over time, depending on the quality of their work. But with paintless dent removal, the color matching problems are a thing of the past. In the process, rather than painting a car that has a dent on it, the professional you're working with will use specialized tools to go behind the skin of the panel or door and massage the dent out manually. By doing it this way, you don't have to mess with any of the original manufacturer's paint.

Not for All Dents

On the other hand, paintless dent removal isn't an option for all the dent repair jobs we handle in Virginia Beach. Cars that have sharp creases and have been stretched too deep can't be helped by this method, especially if the paint on the car has already been damaged. In general, you wouldn't want to do a paintless dent removal job on any dents that are bigger than a baseball. But every job is unique, and I have repaired dents that were much bigger than baseballs using the paintless technique. In fact, I was recently able to repair an entire car door that had been damaged just by using our specialized tools and paintless removal methods.

Cost

When cost is a consideration, paintless dent removal is almost always your best bet. The cost of having a dent repaired the paintless way is usually half as much as it would cost to take the car into a body shop and have it puttied and repainted. Although prices to repair small dings and dents can vary, a car owner can expect a simple, quarter-size ding to cost anywhere from $75 to $125 to repair depending on its location on the car and overall size.

In my 14 years of working in the industry, I have seen a growing interest in paintless dent removal. Today, it is accepted by many auto insurance companies for use when repairing dents made by hailstorms and other small things like golf balls or shopping carts. Usually, the cost of repairing a dent this way is going to be a lot less expensive than what the car owner's deductible for the insurance company is going to be anyway, so that's a real benefit as well.

When it comes to dent repairs in Virginia Beach, paintless dent removal is by far the most popular repair method simply because of the process's effectiveness and its low cost. No matter what caused the damage on a vehicle, I recommend asking the professional whether paintless dent removal is a good option for your specific situation. As long as the dent in question is smooth and shallow, you shouldn't have any problem finding a dent repair specialist.