Hi everyone is Jake here from 1st Track Dents, welcome back again for another
youtube video, today we're working on this Volkswagen Golf GTI it's got quite
a nasty bend in the driver's door edge but I'll be showing the tools and the
process that I use to turn this into this so stay tuned
okay so as you've seen before in the intro we were working on this Volkswagen Golf
GTI so the customer opened their door in some really high winds the door was taken
from their hands straight into a telegraph pole but luckily because it
was a wooden telegraph pole it hasn't caused any paint damage to the edge
itself so looking at this door we can see that the main impact point is here
and this has pulled round quite a large chunk of the door approximately I
would say about 30 centimeters in length but before we get into this repair let
me explain a little bit about the construction of this door because it's
slightly different than most conventional doors so what you'll find
is that most doors are made up of two parts so you've got the inner section
which is the door frame itself and then you've got the outer section which is
the door skin now on a conventional door the door skin wraps around the frame is
then welded at various points sealed with seam sealer as shown here and then
painted so imagine this is the door frame and this is the actual door skin
so it's a kind of cut through section to illustrate how this works so on the door
frame itself you'll notice the frame comes up and then you've got this little
lip on the outer edge of the door so what happens in the factory is the door
skin itself comes down and is laid on to the edge of the door frame then what
happens is a set of pinch rollers will come along onto the outer edge and
they'll roll this edge flat so the edge has now been lipped all the way on to
the actual door frame itself now if we look at the cross-section here now where
all these layers of metal are sandwiched together we can actually see that
there's three layers now so we've got two layers that have been created by the
the outer door skin being sandwiched against the frame and we've got the
frame itself which is another layer now this helps to make this a really strong
door edge which when pushed on the edge is really difficult to bend it around so
with the conventional method if you wanted to replace the door skin it's
quite a big job so you need to cut off the old door skin weld in a new one
reseal it and repaint it now in contrast Volkswagen came up with the idea of
having a bolted door skin, now if you look closely you can just see the
fixing bolts which hold the door skin onto the door frame, so this time let's have a
look at the doorframe so it's very similar to the conventional doorframe as
we saw before but this time you'll notice that there's various holes
punched in the side of the frame and if we look at the door skin itself we can
see that there's a frame bonded onto the inner part of the door skin with
threaded fixing points also you'll notice that the perimeter edge of this
door skin has already been lippred over as seen here so as before the skin is laid
down on top of the doorframe but this time they're fixed together using bolts
sounds like a great idea but now look at the edge when these are fixed together, with
the conventional methods shown here on the left there were three layers of
metal sandwiched together giving it good strength however with a Volkswagon
method here on the right we only have two layers but really because the lip on
the edge here is so small it's almost like just having one layer it's now much
more weaker and the edge bends a lot more easily now this method does have
its advantages obviously now if you do need to change the door skin it's quite
easy to just un-bolt the panel using the bolts at the side of the frame, remove
it, replace with a new one bolt it together and you're done however as far
as I know on all the latest VW models they've now gone back to using the
conventional method. Okay so lastly before we get into it repair these are
the tools that I'll be using today to fix this damage so I've got my standard
hand tools over here nothing fancy just basic hand tools the tip on this one is
slightly sharper than this one I've got my aluminium knock down which is here
which I'll be using in conjunction with the Ultra-Dent screw on tips I've got
the large rubber tip I've got the standard rubber tip and I've got the
nylon tip I've also got a standard nylon tap down which is here and I'll be using
this standard panel beating and hammer which is here I'll leave some links
below of where you can get these tools from but now let's get into this repair
now when carrying out a repair like this, the use of heat is really important as we don't
want to crack or split the paint especially as we have to strike the edge
of the panel
so as you can see I start off by gently tapping the edge back around with my
aluminium tap down using the large rubber tip it's important to take your
time and go up and down the panel gradually drawing the damage out rather
than trying to do it all in just a few hammer blows
okay and when this is done it's really important to check the alignment at the
door with the adjacent panel to make sure both panels align correctly and you
haven't bought the edge back out too far
once this is achieved the next thing to do is to correct the hard line that's
been created here just in from the edge this is the pivot point of where the
metal has bent around it's actually the frame which I demonstrated earlier on my
mock-up model pushing through into the outer skin this is quite common when a
metal edge bends around and also when you bend it back the other way
you're always going to get a hard line or fold line as you can see here so to
remove this I'm using one of my nylon tap downs so depending on how bad the
line is I always make a choice of how sharp the tap down needs to be in this
case the crease line wasn't very sharp so I started with a more rounded nylon
tap down tip to gently knock this Ridge back down, here you have to be very
accurate with your hammer blows it also takes quite a bit of time and patience
to do so I'll speed this part up.
so after tapping down this high ridge you can clearly see that we are now left
with some low areas in front of where this high ridge was this is quite often
the case when an edge is bent back straight again it can distort slightly
and create some low areas this is where the flat shaved hand tools come in as
these can be used to lift these low areas back up again now as I Illustrated
earlier this isn't a conventional door so luckily rather than taking the door
trim off and going down the window aperture to get on the back of these low
areas there is a space between the door skin and the frame to push the tool in -
as illustrated on my mock up model here
I'm using quite a sharp tool here and plenty of heat as I need to push the
tools through the rubber sealant behind the frame in order to get onto the back
of the lower areas, some of the pushes will be a bit sharper than I would like
and I can't use Tesa tape on the tool tip as it just won't push through the
sealant but it's not a problem as they can be tapped level again using the
sharp nylon tap down as shown here
okay so I offer a lot of pushing backwards and forwards and after a lot
of tapping down we've finally got the edge back straight again just needs a
quick polish to remove any surface marks and the jobs complete
okay so I hope you enjoyed this video it was a little bit longer than some of my
other videos and a lot more in depth but if you found it interesting or useful or
you learned something in any way it'd be great to hear about it in the comments
section below and if you enjoyed the video it'd be great to get thumbs up and
if you want to see and learn more about the paintless dent removal process and
see more repairs like this then why not subscribe to my channel and you'll be
notified as soon as new videos are available but for now, we'll see you on
the next video