So today I'm working on this complex damage on the front of this Audi TT and
being an Aluminium panel it's definitely going to make life difficult for me, but
as always stay tuned and I'll show you the complete repair from Start to Finish.
Hi everyone its Jake here from 1st Track Dents and welcome along for another
paintless dent repair video, so today it's the turn of this Audi TT and yet
another Aluminium front wing, so I think we can confidently say that this was
caused by some sort of low-speed collision, now there is some damage to
the paint here but the customer isn't too worried about this because the car
is always parked in a busy London Street and is always getting a knock here and
there but this time it's just gone too far, and believe it or not when I first
viewed this car and booked it in, it sustained another knock on the opposite
front wing. Now to try and repair this sort of damage on a busy main road would be
near impossible but luckily a friendly neighbour allowed us to use his driveway
which was perfect as it was chucking it down with rain, it seems like every job I
do lately is in the pouring rain. Right anyway let's jump in to this repair.....
So let's take a good look at all the damage we need to repair on this front wing,
first we have the main impact point here which I'll call AREA 1 here we can see
that the damage is pushed in the bodyline and a large chunk of the metal
beside it, we also have some scuff marks here which I'll polish off at the end.
moving down the panel we have this damage here at AREA 2 which
runs parallel to the first dent above it which has also pushed in the body line
slightly, further down here AREA 3 we have a high spot which is where
the wing has pushed onto some internal protrusion behind this panel which I'm
sure will become apparent when we remove the wing liner. The customer has
said he's happy to touch this cracked paint in afterwards. Now moving up here to AREA 4,
this dent obviously follows on from the first end at AREA 1 and is
a soft horizontal crease that goes right up to the edge of where the wing meets
the plastic bumper and lastly as I mentioned before this wing is made from
an Aluminium alloy.
Now because it's a wet miserable day the first thing I need to do is put up my large
umbrella and fix it onto my homemade stand so I can keep myself and the panel
as dry as possible, next I need to place the jack underneath onto one of the
jacking points and raise the car up off the ground just a few inches, doing this
will allow me access onto the screws holding the wing liner in place, next
using the correct Torx bit on my tool I can start removing some of the screws
holding the wing liner in place. I'm not removing all the screws just the
ones at the front here.
As the wing liner is made from a soft flexible material I only need to un-clip
it from the wheel arch edge so that it can be pushed aside easily. Looking
behind have quite a nice open area in which to work and looking down here we
can see the internal protrusion which caused the high spot we mentioned earlier
in my analysis. Now because of this drain pipe here I'll need to push it aside to
prevent any damage to it when pushing behind. Lastly I lower the vehicle so the
gap is sufficiently enough to get some good leverage from the tyre if
needed. Ok so some of you may have seen me use this support prop before it's not a PDR
tool but it's great if you need to give a lot of force into a front wheel arch
and don't want to blow out at the edge of the wing or split the edge underneath
which is more likely to happen when working on an Aluminium panel. Now with my
light board positioned correctly and the support prop in place, it's time to start
pushing out the main part of this damage.
So I'm going to start off with the biggest part of this damage first, I'm
using plenty of heat here to soften the paint then I'm going to go straight in
with my large rubber tip on my screw on tip bar.
I'm concentrating on the body line here and the low section right next to it.
As you can see some of this damage popped out in a couple of hard pushes
although it doesn't just all pop out completely, it's quite a complex dent to
do so needs a lot of time spent on it. So as I've mentioned on other Aluminium
repair videos this metal isn't easy to push out and requires a lot more force
to get the metal to move where you want it to go, so I had to spend quite a bit
of time carefully pushing this wing roughly back into shape, then using my
small Aluminium hammer with a large rubber tip I hammered back down the
crowns around this main dent, this helps to relieve a lot of tension surrounding
the damage in order to help the metal flow back into shape, so now the main
damage has been pushed out I'm going to rough out the complete panel and I'm
going to start with this area just below the main impact point so I reposition my
light into a position to get the best view of this damage and then secondly I
warm up the panel to soften the paint to prevent it from cracking
so as this damage here is quite shallow and soft I'm starting off with my screw
on tip bar and a standard rubber tip so using some strong pushes and some good
leverage off the tyre, I carefully push this dent out to get it back to its
rough shape again.
So there are a couple of areas I'm concentrating on here, the low section of
the curve profile and the edge profile of the wheel arch. Using my knockdown
with the nylon tip I tap down any high areas that have come up through the
pushing process.
So from some basic initial pushes the shape has started to come back quite
nicely, next it's time to flatten some of the crowns surrounding this area of
damage. Okay so now time to move up to the top area of damage again, and really
concentrate on getting this wheel arch profile back into shape again. So again
plenty of heat is required then moving the pipe aside underneath I use
the same standard rubber tip to start pushing out the profile line.
And then using various knockdowns as shown here to address the high areas
around the profile line and as you can see here the high areas are moving back
into alignment with the surrounding metal again.
Then it's back down to finish roughing out the body line again of the lower dent
and as you can see the edge profile of this wing is starting to move back into place.
I'm using my Nylon tap down here to assist in removing any high areas caused
by the pushing out of the bodyline. I
then continue on pushing out the small low areas left in this profile line. Okay
so I've changed position now to help with the removal of any high areas up
and down the flat wheel arch section, again I'm using a range of different
knockdowns to achieve this. Now it's time to move into the curved profile section
to start removing the soft horizontal crease, first I'm going to deal with this
high crown just here highlighted in yellow. To remove this I'm using my
Aluminium knock down with a standard rubber tip.
Now this high crown has been removed I can lift up the low area just beside it.
For this I'm just using the standard nylon tip on my screw on tip bar. So
using this tip I move around the area underneath lifting it up in a controlled
way in order to bring it out cleanly without putting any sharp pushes into it.
Some areas will come up slightly high, but using my nylon tap down I just tap
these areas back down again.
And there we go, so now I'm happy with the initial roughing out the wheel arch
profile I'll come back later and fine-tune this. So now all the heavy
pushing near the edge is done I can now remove the support prop and concentrate
on all the remaining areas of the damage left on the panel. So the next part of
damage I'm going to remove is this high spot here which has cracked the paint, now
because the paint is broken I'm going to take extra care here so that I don't
chip the paint when tapping this down, so I did this in a series of pushes
stopping every few taps to check the condition of the paint. Okay so I'm happy
with this high spot removal so time to move on to the other soft horizontal
crease. Now this soft crease goes right up to the edge where the panel meets the
bumper so being this damage is further in the panel and because we're dealing
with Aluminium I'm using my large screw on tip bar so I can get some good leverage
Now a good tip here when heating a panel next to a plastic bumper is to direct the
heat away from the plastic, the heat will be drawn into the edge anyway and this
will prevent burning or distorting the edge of the plastic where it meets the
wing.
So I'm starting off using my standard nylon tip and I'm starting at the point
of where the wing meets the bumper. Using this nylon tip and a lot of leverage. i'm
pushing this horizontal crease out slowly and I'm working my way back
towards the wheel arch. There's quite a lot of metal to push up here so I'm
taking my time and trying to push the metal out cleanly. Using my nylon tap
down I remove any high areas, I then continue on bringing up this horizontal
crease. As always I pushed out the damage from different angles which meant
getting into some very strange positions!
So now I'm at the fine-tuning stage, so I'm starting off first on the flat arch
profile and I'm using my standard screw on metal tip here, this is one of the
best tips to start pushing out all these micro lows. Here I'm going over the whole
repair again bringing up all the micro lows left over from the roughing out
stage. I've sharpened up my nylon tip so that I can tap down all the sharp little
high spots
now moving into the Wheel arch section again we can see the horizontal crease
earlier was reduced to a fine line horizontal crease so to remove this I'm
using my standard metal tip. I can use this to slowly work along the final
crease to push the center out and bring it in line with the surrounding metal.
Now this can't be done in one single pass, it requires a few passes with the
tool and some tapping down with my nylon tap down until I'm happy it is all level. So
at this stage I removed all the scuffs and scratches there on the edge of the
wheel arch section and then gave the complete panel a nice polish using some
fine polishing compound.
So here I had to jack the car up slightly again, then with the stone car
pushed back into position, I replaced all the little Torx screws that I removed
earlier. Only then I can lower the car back down again to check out the
FINAL RESULT!
well I hope you enjoyed my approach when repairing a panel like this,
it was certainly challenging not only because it was an Aluminium panel, but
because I was working in this freezing cold rain and also the light was
starting to fade away very very quickly. By the time I got around to repairing
the dent on the opposite side I was almost working in complete
darkness. As always if you enjoyed watching this repair it would be great to get
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latest videos. That's all for now, thanks again for watching and I'll see you all
on the next video.
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