Today it's the turn of this Nissan Note with this dent here on the top of
the tailgate, the only problem with this dent is that it has a sharp Center which
has stretched the metal slightly, can I repair this without filler or paint? stay
tuned to find out...
Hi everyone is Jake here from 1st Track Dents and welcome along for another
paintless dent repair video, so today I'm working on this 2015 Nissan Note, now
this dent was caused by the customer reversing into a sharp piece of plastic
which unfortunately didn't get picked up by the reverse park camera, some of the
white plastic has transferred onto this panel so before I can analyze this dent
to work out which way i'm going to approache this repair, I first need to polish this off
so I can see the full extent of this damage. To remove this white plastic
residue off the panel i'm using some 3M Fast cut compound as it will make
light work of removing this scuff. So you can see straight away how deep this
little crease is in the middle of this dent as the polishing compound has
filled up the dented cavity. Luckily it doesn't need too much compounding and it
came off quite easily. After compounding I give it a good wipe down to remove
any polish from the panel. Now the panel is clean I can analyze the full extent
of this damage.
Okay let's go back a minute before it was polished, so we know that was caused by
a low-speed collision into a piece of sharp plastic, so straightaway we know
that the direction of impact was in a straight line. This created a very sharp
impact point and pulled in the surrounding metal a distance of
approximately 25 centimeters by 12 centimeters if we look at the side view
here we can see it's also taken in a small section of the top body line and
pushed it inwards and upwards shown here by this red line. We can also see this
slight deviation going upwards in this profile line from this head-on view here.
Now with a panel polished and my light by the side we can see a lot more detail.
Here we can see the two obvious crowns either side of this damage shown here in
red. The really dark shadow in the middle of this dent shows us how deep and
stretched this centre is, this I've highlighted here in yellow, The last
thing to mention is that once all the white plastic transfer was polished off
it revealed a very minor scratch that had penetrated through the base coat so
this won't polish out but the customer's happy to touch this in with some
touch-up paint afterwards.
The first thing I need to do is remove the internal tailgate trim, now looking
at this trim underneath there are no screws holding this in place its simply
held on by plastic trim clips, therefore using my plastic wedge I
simply pull down on one corner to release a couple of clips I'm then able
to get my hand in behind the trim and pull the whole trim downwards. Looking at
the internal frame of this panel we can see there there are plenty of access
points to thread the tools in in order to get on the back of this damage and if
we look inside here we can see the underside of this damage and the sharp
impact point which is here. Now in order to work on this tailgate I need to fix
it into a comfortable position so I'm using my ratchet strap which I hook into
both parts of the locking system as shown here. I then lower the tailgate
into the position I need it to be in. Next I position it onto my support prop. I
then pull the a ratchet strap rope to secure the panel into place. This will
now ensure the panel doesn't move around too much. The next thing I do is place my
light into a good position so I can get a really good view of all the damage
when I'm working on it.
Just My Luck I initially put my umbrella up to shade the panel from the bright
Sun peering through the clouds, but that disappeared very quickly and has turned
into heavy rain and strong winds. Before I do any heavy pushing I always use my
heat gun to soften the paint slightly, this will prevent the paint from
cracking. Right the first bar I'm using here is one of my long screw on tip bars
and I'm using it with a large rubber tip. I'm trying to push all the surrounding
soft metal up first to try and give the panel some stability before I use
something sharper to push the center up. Normally I would start with a sharp
tip, I'm just doing whatever I can to prevent stretching this panel any
further than it already is. I'm now switching up to a standard rubber tip to
bring some of the smaller low areas up and to bring up the pushed-in body line
at the top edge. As you can probably see here the rain is really starting
to hammer down now.
Once the low areas are pushed up I'm using my large rubber tip on my
Aluminium hammer to knock down all the large crowns around this repair.
A quick review shows that most of the surrounding damage is up, I now need to
move into the center and rough out the rest of this dent.
Now the first stage of pushing up is done, it's time to rough out the rest of this
damage and I'm going to start by using my Nylon tap down to soften up the
perimeter of this dent so that I can push this dent up without stretching it
further than it already is. Again I'm using plenty of heat especially as this
Center is so tight. I'm using my Nylon tip here to push up this dent in the
surrounding area, as you can see I have to push this dent up and tap it back
down again so weaken it and release all the tight areas. Luckily this dent is at
the top of the panel near the body line profile just under the window as this is
what's giving it it's strength. If this type of dent was much lower down or in
the middle of the door for example it would have been game over as there would
have been too much flex in the panel and it would have been popping in and out by
now which is otherwise known as oil canning. I'm now moving the light into a
different position to cross-check the repair and as you can see there is still
a little low Ridge running along the top of the panel that wasn't really visible
from the other angle I was working from. So using heat again I soften the paint
slightly then I go underneath with my Nylon tip to push this low Ridge up.
Because I'm working near the top of the panel near the profile line it makes
this area quite strong, so I have to use a lot of force to get the metal to move,
then using my nylon tap down, I tap down all the high areas.
U sing my hammer with a large rubber tip I also remove any high crowns around
this dent. Again as you can see the wind and freezing rain is still continuing, so
it's making this repair even more challenging. After some more heat I've
now switched up to my plastic tip to try and get the rest of this sharp Center up.
It's taken a lot of time and several techniques to try and persuade this sharp
Center to come up without stretching it further. It is coming up but it's taking a lot
of time to do and I'm concerned as I'm going to be losing daylight soon as the
sky is already dark with all the rain clouds. I'm still using my nylon tap down
to remove all the different sharp indentations from the panel and it does
feel like I'm actually starting to get somewhere with this stubborn stretched
low area
As all the pushes and tap downs need to be more precise, I'm sharpening up my
Nylon tap down to a very fine point, this will help me to be far more
accurate went tapping the sharp high areas back down. As you can see I'm taking my
time to be very accurate and I'm going around the whole area to remove these
high points. Next I heat the panel to soften the paint. For all of the fine
detail work I'm going to use one of my original bars from A-1 tools, link down in
the description. This makes light work of bringing up all these little micro lows
and being quite thin it slides through the back frame easily. As I've mentioned
before this is the slowest part of the repair as it takes a lot of time and
requires a very detailed eye. Here you can see I'm moving around the dent in
order to view it from as many angles as possible, this will ensure that I don't
miss a little high spot here or a little low spot there. I'm using a bit more heat
here and I'm still using my standard tip bar from A-1 tools to bring up all the
little micro lows. I'm getting closer to the end of the repair now so all the
small micro lows are reducing smaller and smaller. There will still be a small
wave left in the panel as this panel is still slightly stretched. A last few taps
to remove some of the crowns left on the panel and it's time to polish the repair
and put the internal trim back into place. Using some 3M Fast Cut and Finesse
polish, I remove any marks from the PDR process and flat down and polish the
little scratch from earlier to reduce it as much as possible, ready for the
customer to touch in in later.
Refitting this trim is just as straightforward as removing it. With the
tailgate open fully it's just a matter of lining up all the little white
plastic clips in their respective holes and with a gentle bit of force they just
snap back into place. So now the inner trim is fitted we can close this
tailgate and check out the FINAL RESULT!
Well thanks everyone for sticking around on this repair and watching my approach
to repair and damage of this type. Now I had to repair this dent as cautiously as
I could and because the metal on this particular make and model isn't always
the easiest to work with and the fact that the metal was still slightly stretched,
there was a very slight wave left in the panel. I did polish the scratch and reduce
that down slightly and the customer said he is happy to touch this in afterwards. So
thanks again for watching, if you liked the video it be great to get a thumbs up
and if you want to see more videos like this then pop along to my YouTube
channel where you'll find many more repairs like this to choose from and if
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that's it for now, thanks again for watching and I'll see you all on the
next video!