- I hate this.
This is like more annoying than my hair.
Can $200 worth of dent removal tools do better
than $600 worth of professional work?
Let's see if I can fix these dents
without ruining the paint.
Should I DIY, or should I don't?
♪ Do it ♪
♪ Don't do it ♪
- Thanks to carparts.com for sponsoring today's video.
Everyone struggles with relationships
and your relationship with your car is no different.
So what brings you in here today, Jobe?
- Well, listen, Miata just doesn't trust me.
Every time I leave the garage,
it acts like I'm gonna abandon it,
just like all it's previous owners
- [Miata] But Jobe, I caught you looking at other car sites.
So admit it, you're looking to replace me.
Just like everyone else.
- No, I'm not!
For the millionth time, I was just on those sites
trying to find some cool new parts for you to make you happy
but everything's just so expensive nowadays.
- You see, it was all just a misunderstanding,
which shows how important communication be
in car relationships.
And I'd like to communicate something to you, Jobe.
Check out carparts.com.
Carparts.com is the smarter way to shop for auto parts,
connecting you with the right part at the right price,
hassle free.
Plus carparts.com has a lifetime replacement guarantee
on parts, so you can place trust in your relationship
with your car for a life time.
- I didn't know any of that,
I'm sorry I made you feel that way.
- [Miata] I'm sorry, too.
I guess I've been a little sensitive ever since
someone put a We Buy Junk Cars card in my wiper.
- Listen, you're not junk.
At least not to me, okay? You're beautiful.
- [Miata] Ooh, go on.
- Get the right parts right now at carparts.com.
Check it out and maintain the love with your car today.
(groans)
- Welcome to DIY or Don't.
Today we're gonna tackle paintless dent repair,
and find out whether or not it's worth trying to do yourself
or if it's a job best left to the pros.
Sure, sometimes doing stuff yourself might save you
a little money, but you gotta consider:
the effort it's gonna take,
the amount of time it's gonna take,
and at the end of the day,
are you gonna be able to do as good of a job as a pro could?
Today, we're gonna be using two cars you may recognize
and try to fix some dents.
We've picked out two dents on each car
and we've got ourselves a pro
and he's gonna tackle the Miata,
while I try my hand at the E36.
That's not the right amount of heat, I guess.
Dent repair seems easy enough
if you watch enough infomercials and TikTok videos
where they just pour some hot water onto a dent
and it pops right out, but is it that easy?
The biggest thing you might stumble on with dents
is that like people, they're all different.
Each dent is different and you need to treat them as such.
And if you don't treat 'em right,
you might wreck your paint.
There are a lot of different methods to fixing a dent.
The old drill and pull method, body filler,
but some dents can even be fixed
without affecting your paint.
Paintless dent repair uses heat and an array of bending
and pulling tools to flex the metal back into place,
slowly reversing how the dent was made in the first place.
It doesn't work for every dent
but you'd be surprised how severe a dent can be
and still be saved by a paintless dent repair pro.
You gotta check and see what material
your dent is actually dented in.
Is it plastic on the bumper,
or metal on somewhere else on the car?
Is it super deep? Are there creases? Is it on a body line?
All those things are gonna make it probably more difficult
to deal with and gonna take some tricks
that you might not have up your sleeve.
So how do I make sure that my paint
doesn't just end up as a pile of flakes on the floor?
Well, our pro Jason is here to tell us just that.
This is Jason, our pro today,
he's a paintless dent repair wizard,
and he's got a mobile truck that he can come to
your place of work, your home, wherever you are,
and fix your dent without needing any body work.
- So being mobile, you have to be prepared for anything.
Top drawer these are all different knockdowns you would use.
- These are like kind of a punch that you would use
to knock down material.
- We're gonna take your car apart, any panel tool needed.
- Is this a battery powered hot glue gun?
- [Jason] It is. - That's awesome.
All right, so I see you got a bunch more rods.
How much do these things cost a piece?
- To make an average, they're about $100 a piece.
- I spent a hundred bucks on my whole set.
- We'll see how that works out.
- Yes we will.
So when you show up to a customer's house
and they got a dent, how do you determine
how much you're gonna charge 'em to fix it?
- [Jason] Well, if a professional dent guy shows up
to do the repair they'll be using a pricing guide like this.
It's based on size, and then if there's any factors,
which is on the back.
- All right, so what's the damage?
What's the total value of all these tools?
- [Jason] Roughly 25 to 30 grand,
after you have all the tools, the lights,
glue pull stuff, tabs,
the other tools to do the job properly.
- Well, you seem to be prepared.
Let's go see how prepared I am.
Okay, so I spent about 200 bucks total on two tool sets.
First, I got these rods, basically $100 here.
And then for another $100, I got this dent puller
hot glue assortment of tools.
What do you think?
- This is a good beginner set, I would say,
- Hey!
- They feel like they're pretty good quality.
- Now what about this stuff?
Do you think, I'm even gonna use any of this?
Is it good to have?
- This is dangerous, in my opinion.
- Ooh! - Glue pulling,
you can pull paint right off of a car.
You can make the dent way too high and stretch the metal
and not be able to recover from that.
I have had customers call me then they've stretched the dent
to where I could not repair it,
because they bought something similar to this.
- So I guess that's the risk you run.
Well, I wanna see you fix the small dent on the Miata first,
so I can kind of poke, prod, ask you some questions,
see what you're doing.
- [Jason] You got it.
- Then I'll try a small dent on the E36
and then we'll go head to head with some big dents.
- Let's go.
- We got the car jacked up, you got some room,
got heat going on the dent. Now what?
- We'll put up light, stick the rod in there,
and we're gonna start working the center of the dent first.
These are all screw on tips.
And then as the dent starts to come up
and it's closer and closer to being finished,
you graduate down smaller tip,
eventually to something super sharp
and make it look just like orange peel.
- Like how long do you expect this dent to take you to fix?
- An hour or under, we should be done with it?
- Timer starts now.
These rod tools are made to press on the dent from behind.
A simple turn of the handle presses the tip of the tool
into the dent, but you need something to lever off of.
- So as the dent starts to shrink up,
the tip of your tool will go accordingly.
See this little pin spot?
This tip is too big for that.
- How can you tell that it's too?
- Cause I can see the tip of the tool moving in the light.
And right when it's in the center of that dent,
it's pushing up the sides of it also.
- [Jobe] Yeah, I can see that. Okay, cool.
- The dent started to get mounded up
as we were trying to get at the center of the dent.
So we just knocked down what we've done,
start the process over.
We've got the dent down to very little.
It's time to get into the center of that
with the sharp tip tool.
Okay, so we're done with the dent.
We move the light as far back as possible to get a good view
of the top part of the fender.
And now we're gonna tell everyone when we're done.
And we're done.
- All right, Jimmy, stop the stopwatch.
- [Jimmy] One hour, 37 minutes, and 22 seconds.
- Not too bad, so you said about an hour,
but we were bugging you and making you talk to the camera.
So I'd say that'd probably be an hour
if you're out in the wild.
Well, let's see how you did.
Where was it? It was like here, yeah?
- [Jason] Yes.
- Well, good work, sir.
- [Jason] Thank you.
- Yeah I mean you literally,
I can't tell where it was at all.
Pretty impressive.
I don't stand a chance, do I? Find out.
(upbeat music)
So the point here is that I can look at my dent
while I try to fix it,
and I see these lines reflected in the dent.
Now where there is dent, the lines reflect all wonky.
We gotta unwarp those lines.
At this particular moment,
I'm regretting how low the E36 is.
I don't have a lot of room to get through here.
The wheel like that's probably as good as it's gonna get
for us, so I'm gonna lock it down there,
put some heat to this thing, and start pushing some metal.
Well, I think it's been about 10 minutes.
I've made 0% progress.
Starting to wonder if I'm gonna be able to fix
any dents at all.
The hardest part is just like getting the tool on the dent,
keeping it there, and actually pushing against it.
The whole thing that you gotta do.
I took the wheel off so I can get a little bit more of
my head in here and actually see the back side of the dent.
I'm just leveraging off the unit body in here.
I think we actually might be able to make some progress now.
A dent inside a fender is probably the easiest dent
I could have started with.
If this dent was on an A pillar or a quarter panel
or some thing difficult to get the tool behind,
it would be even harder.
This sucks.
I hate this. I hate this.
I mean, listen, the dent is way less there,
but I don't know if it looks better.
It looks like I stabbed it a bunch of times
with a screwdriver from the back.
Okay, so part of the dent, I think I went a little too far.
These are basically little punches with replaceable tips.
I'm gonna use 'em to knock down the high bits.
If 100% is like this dent never existed,
I think we're probably gonna be somewhere
in the 60 to 70% range.
- [Jason] Let's check it out.
- [Jobe] I've got most of the dent pushed out, I feel like,
but you can see a lot of little tool marks.
- When you're working a dent like this,
you can see those little push marks that are the high spots,
those have pushed past and bubbled the paint a little.
It's not cracked.
So to get rid of those, tap down the high spots,
work it up a little and knock the sides out of it.
- This definitely seems like something you get better at
with time.
I think I could realistically spend the rest of the day
just on this dent.
But I think for the sake of time and our sanity,
we should probably move on to our head-to-head portion
of this, where we're both gonna do a big dent
at the same time.
You're obviously gonna win,
it's not a competition like that.
But you know, we got some big dents that need--
we got some big dents that need fixed.
So let's get to it.
Okay, Jimmy, start that timer.
- [Jason] All right, we're gonna take the taillight out now.
So let's set up our light and go to work.
So by tapping the crown that's around the dent,
we're gonna relieve some pressure,
and then we'll start pushing.
After looking at this dent,
we can tell that this part right here
is in an area that does not have access for tools.
It is where the outer and inner panels are welded
and glued together.
So we're gonna work everything that we can get a tool on,
try and do a little glue pulling in here
to see if we can make it better.
Let's see if we can relieve some of this pressure.
♪ Jason the professional knows every dent is different ♪
♪ He's strapped for any type of day ♪
♪ He's got the right equipment ♪
♪ And he's got the know how for any situation ♪
♪ Look at the flick of the wrist ♪
♪ Damn, that's coordination ♪
- So I'm really wondering if I should pull out the ol'
hot glue dent puller and hit it right in there, just.
(clicks)
I feel like I should.
So the transparent glue stick is for Japanese cars
which have thin paint, but the yellow glue stick
is for European and American cars, which have thick paint.
But they only came with more one color of glue stick.
So that's the color we're gonna go with.
Just glue that right there and yank that sucker out.
I don't know if I'm gonna be able to get all these dents out
though , I don't have the correct attire on.
It seems leather pants and high heels
are just what the doctor ordered.
If I rip off the paint, you're gonna see me cry.
If I'm being honest,
that's what I thought it was gonna happen.
Well I hit the paint with some Goo Gone
and the glue seemed to stick a lot better.
Possibly to my detriment.
There's definitely less dent there,
but there's also a lot more glue there.
I don't know if this is saving me time.
I mean, I think this is helping.
There's so much hot glue in the area,
it's kind of tough to tell at this point.
Well, after the hot glue treatment
and pulling the dent out with the slide hammer,
there's definitely less dent, but it's still dented.
There's still dent to be fixed
and I guess really the hard work comes now.
We're gonna pull out the rods now
and try to work the rest of this dent out.
That said, I don't think I'm gonna be able to do a whole lot
about this little area right here,
where we're right on the lip.
I'll give it a shot,
but I expect that's not gonna get perfect.
Well this, so we've got this crease on the body line there,
and so it's dented in
and then you can see how badly dented up this is.
And I just don't know what to do about that.
- So it's a give and take. Tap down a little, push a little.
But this really is gonna be really hard to get out.
- Well, I don't think I'm gonna win this one.
I've known that for some hours now.
But I would like to see how you did
on the ol' Miata, wanna go take a look?
- Yeah, let's take a look.
- [Jason] Wow!
It looks way better.
I knew that was gonna be a really tricky area to get into.
But I mean this whole corner looked terrible.
I backed into my roommate's car a while ago.
Well, dang, I mean, it looks like you've got
the tools for the job
and because of that and your experience and skills,
you did a lot better job than me.
I think I'm gonna go ahead and take my Ls on this one.
(audience aw sound effect)
- I think you did a great job though. (audience ooh)
- Well, I do appreciate that,
but I guess that's why you pay a pro.
You've got the skills and experience
and you can show up and make it happen without any question.
Without the sweat pour outta your own head.
Okay, so let's hash this out.
First let's start with cost.
He would've charged us about $600 to fix the two dents
on the Miata.
And I spent about $200 on tools.
So the cost saving seems pretty good.
But the problem is that I can't buy skills and experience.
So that brings me to my next point, effort.
I was like a blind squirrel over here
try trying to find a nut.
And he obviously knew what he was doing.
And on the other side of that coin is time.
This can take me literally days and days.
And as those days go on, sure I'd get better at it,
sure I'd develop the skills
and get a little bit of experience,
but it's gonna be a long time.
It's gonna be a long, cold winter
before I've got the experience and skills of a pro.
Okay, now let's talk outcome.
I mean, what do you guys think? Did I win?
No! I mean, you can still see my dents.
The dent on the fender came out like it was never there.
My dents did not.
I lose.
The pro wins.
I hate this.
- Check out Donut's new badass We Buy Junk Cars shirt.
Get it in this nice black and yellow.
Or this luxurious white and warm red. Mm.
Plus, if you order right now,
we're gonna include these:
Limited edition We Buy Junk Cars business cards.
So you can help spread the word. Junk.
And unlike these junk cars, this shirt is quality that lasts
at the low price of 29.98, which is much cheaper
than buying one of these used junk cars.
Yeah, that's a great piece of junk.
So go to donutmedia.com to pick up
your junk car shirt today.
This thing is sick.
- You know, it's worth remembering that
if you do take a crack at this, well,
you can do worse than just doing not that good of a job.
You can actually ruin
whatever part of the car you're working on.
So if you do, if you wreck a fender
that you're trying to fix a dent in,
you can head on over to carparts.com
and get yourself a new one.
Thanks to them for sponsoring this episode.
Also huge thanks to Jason from NeverDent
for coming out and playing with us.
You can follow him on Instagram @NeverDentOfficial
or hit his website, neverdent.com.
As for myself, you can follow me on Instagram @ZachJobe.
You can follow Donut @DonutMedia,
and of course like the video and subscribe to the channel.
Thank you guys for coming to this one,
we'll see you next time.