I have a friend who does dent repair for Dent Wizard. When I had my HHR over at his place to have about 10 dings removed, he told me just about all the newer cars today use thin metal to save weight. It is not just the HHR with this easy to dent thing going on.

 

When the Grand Prix was built in Oshawa, they had a problem when opening the passenger door handles. If you put your thumb above the door handle when opening the door an indentation appeared just above the handle. They resolved this by adding a support inside the door above the handle. Now that was thin metal.

 

Dent removal is old hat. It is nothing but metal forming a lost art for many years.

There are good and poor dent guys as it takes time to master the art.

I have a guy here in town that has done it for years. He can remove most repairtable dents in 5-10 min. ALso he has many tools he has made for specific cars and types of dents the local dent wizard does not have.

It is fun to watch him work and he has shown me some of his tricks but with out the the practice they are useless to me.

I like to fab a lot of things in the garage in building and modifying cars. The one thing I have always wanted to learn is how to metal form on a English wheel and Plenisher. It is hard on the hands and thumb nails but still a art form.

One trick they also uses in areas you can get too is to drill a small hole insert the rod remove the dent then primer and plug the hole.

 

Yes it is a Thing of Magic to Watch an Expert Work His Craft! My Detail Shop "KID" Got One of the Rear Doors on our Panel Half Way Closed ! Not Noing any Better and with No Door Handle He Pushed Just Above the Body Line to Close, "WTF" a Nice Palm Sized Indentation ! The Gentlemen was Bad A$$ in Doing His Job and in Approximately 20 Minutes You Would Have Never Known it was There and My Blood Preasure was Back to Normal !

Happy Holidays,

 

We all deal with dents... The "Dings" are the A-H's that cause them!!

 

I have actually considered learning the art of paintless dent removal. Even got some info on it (with the dent/dings on my car I could pay for classes in savings). I have been detailing cars for years now, and the "art" part - well, been an artist for a long time...Even though Champaign Urbana is not small (about 100K people) we don't have any body who does this stuff locally - the guys who do it come in to town once a week...and charge big $$.

 

Dent resistance of sheetmetal panels is impacted greatly by the curvature of the panel as well as the degree to which the panel was stretched and work-hardened when stamped in the draw die. Sometimes, due to panel shape, it is challenging to design a draw die that will stretch the panel sufficiently in the larger/flatter areas of the panel.

As others have mentioned here, metal thickness also has considerable impact to dent resistance but... panel thicknesses, especially exterior panels visible to the customer, are pretty consistent across all vehicles and even manufacturers.

 

Thin metal to save weight and look who sits in them. Fat overweight Americans, can't be many of us normal weight people around anymore. Guess those getting good mpg are us lightweight guys.

 

I found a small dent on my right rear door, and then another one magically appeared on my hood! Paint isn't scratched, so I didn't get nailed by a rock or anything. Maybe the air pressure got to it!

 

Hey, I Resemble that Remark ! That Probably Explains why Along with that Heavy Right Foot of Mine Our HHR Doesn't even Come Close to the Estimated MPG !