Hi everyone is Jake here from first Track Dents bringing you along for another Paintless Dent Removal video
Today is the turn of this 2014 Ford Focus
So I'm gonna be showing you all the stages of this repair so you can get a good idea of all the processes
involved in a Paintless Dent Removal repair of this type, so
From what we can see it's pretty obvious that another vehicle has turned into this panel
Most likely were their bumper because we can see there's some paint on the front edge here
it's a fairly large dent to have on the front wing and it's left some very interesting damage
But before I start to analyze the dent to work out my Paintless Dent Removal strategy
The first thing I like to do is to clean the panel so I can see exactly what I'm dealing with.
This is easily achieved by using some cutting compound on an electric mop
So the good news is that there isn't any paint damage on the face of the panel
however
as we look underneath the panel we can see that we have a couple of stress creases here and
Some very noticeable but minor paint damage
Looking from this underneath view we can also see how far the profile line of the wing has moved in. It's roughly about 20 millimetres
You can also see this from this alternative view here
Now the impact point was either from this direction or this direction
And what we can see is that the impact force takes the path of least resistance, which is here
However, it does until it reaches this area above but because we have these two strong body lines across here
The pressure wave is stopped dead in its tracks
Forming this lump or what? We like to call a crown
So before we can get behind and start tackling this, the I first need to loosen the stone guard underneath and move it aside
This is done by removing the clips holding it in place
Now a good tip to help this is to use some gentle heat which will allow the plastic stone guard to be moved to side
easily
This is what I like to call the roughing out stage, heat is very important here to prevent the paint cracking
So start with a large rubber tip on an ultra double Bend tool
I'm gonna start pushing the sharp body line
Indentation as I know there's a lot of pressure here waiting to be released as you can hear by this loud popping sound
Now as expected this didn't miraculously pop out all the damage
It's just released some of the pressure. So there's still lots of work to be done here
So I continue on roughing the panel back out removing some of the lower areas
Now it's quite interesting this dent is now broke apart into two separate areas
separated by the soft metal joining them together. So now I can work on these two areas separately
So at this stage, I'm not really concerned about this high crown above, first
I want to push up as many of these low areas as possible
Now this is probably one of the hardest areas of this wing to repair as the edge is really weak
So I have to be very careful about how much force I apply as the lower edge could buckle and potentially split
I'm using my fingers here to provide some support to prevent that from happening
So now I'm gonna push up these two low areas right here on the body line, for this I'm going to use my nylon tip
Okay, so before I start moving on to the huge crown
there just on top. It's time to push out the last of the deep low areas just below
Now before we get back into the last stages of this repair
I just wanted to give you my explanation of why I left this crown until last, now
every crown is different and different methods apply when removing them. So imagine this is an over exaggerated side profile of the wing
So this is the top area of the wing coming down to the crown
We've got the low area the dented area in front of the crown coming down to the wheel arch
Now because this crown is very sharp. There's going be a lot of tension in the tip
here making this area very very strong and because of the shape of the wing up here
This area will also be very very strong
So at the beginning of the repair if I had come in here and I'd started tapping down this crown
What would have happened is the metal would not have been able to flow back into this area here?
Because this is a very very strong area
So all that would have happened is this strong area here would have pushed this soft metal
Much further in making this dent a lot lot bigger
So my method
Is to lift up as much of this soft area of metal as possible in front of that crown
Getting it as straight as I can
So that when it comes to tapping down this crown
the metal has got a much easier path and a better direction to flow back into
which hopefully
Should make this crown a lot easier to tap down and give me a lot less cleanup time at the end of the repair
So, how did it turn out? Well, let's get back to the repair...
Now because this is quite a sharp crown I'm using a nylon tip on my tap down and spending quite a lot of time gradually
Tapping it down moving from either side of the crown, and you can see that slowly. The metal is returning back to its original shape
So as you can see
The crown is almost flat against and it's only left a few minor low errors
Which are easily corrected by some pushing from behind and further tapping down
Because of the lip at the bottom on this wheel arch, before when I was using the Ultra-Dent screw on tip bar with a nylon
tip, I could only get to the mid-section of the flat wheel arch profile
Now I'm using a double bend shaved tool which will allow me to get right down into the lower edge
Because this shaved tool has quite a sharp tip, I've wrapped it in some Tesa tape to prevent any sharp pushes
So now I'm switching some of the sharper tips to fine-tune this repair and to lift up all the micro lows
Next it's time to remove any imperfections left on the panel
Now with the rain closing in it's time to put the stone guard back in place and check out the final result....
Well, thanks for coming along on this repair
I really hope you found it interesting to see my approach when repairing damage of this type
If you have any questions at all, please feel free to leave them in the comments section below
Now being a silver metallic paint finish
there was a slight little bit of bruising left behind from where the crown was, now this was because when the initial
impact occurred and the metal folded up the
microscopic Aluminium particles that sit on the top get disturbed, which in turn
affects the way that they reflect the light back, but luckily this was very very minimal and was barely even noticeable
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That's it for now. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you all on the next video!