So today I'm working on a Mercedes ice cream van, as you can see this front
wing has sustained a heavy impact that has stretched the metal and left a very
deep crease going vertically but stay tuned and I'll show you all the stages
it took to straighten this panel back to this!
Hi everyone its Jake here from 1st Track Dents and welcome along for another
paintless dent removal video, as explained in the intro today i'm working
on this Mercedes ice-cream van which has sustained a heavy impact on the
passenger side front wing leaving this crease as shown here, now the customer
initially sent me a photo of this dent and i said yeah no problem I can fix
this for you however when I arrived and saw this dent, I realized that the photo
didn't do this dent justice at all and I was ready to walk away and advise this
customer to take this to a local body shop, however the customer explained to
me that because this was work vehicle, everyday it was off the road it would be costing
him money and because of this three-stage red white and green paint
stripe system on the front wing it wouldn't be an easy fix to mask, paint
and match these colors back up again. So we had a nice dry workshop to use and
really it was the perfect day to try and fix this because with this weather I'm
guessing he's not gonna be selling many ice creams, so we agreed that I would do
the very best that I could. Right let's jump in to this repair....
Right let's take a closer look at this damage now it's quite obvious that
something must have hit this wing very hard and very quickly to form this
crease and stretch this metal it's also left some secondary damage around it so
there are many areas that need to be addressed first we have the obvious line
crease that runs all the way from the top of the wheel arch down through the
profile line and stops at the edge of the panel, we also have this crown around
the perimeter of the crease here and if we look above the top of this line
crease we have a secondary crease forming an arc shape and if you look
closely we have quite a large low area sitting above and around the whole
damaged marked here in yellow it's also worth mentioning that the panel is
manufactured from mild steel. Now when we look at this dent under the LED fog board
you can really get a sense of how deep and stretched this metal really is by how
dark the centre is, we can also see more clearly the low areas I just highlighted
around this damage too.
So because this crease is very sharp, I need to use a lot of heat to prevent the
paint from cracking. So initially I put on a standard rubber tip onto my screw
on tip bar and just gave some gentle pushes underneath, just so I could feel
the type of tension that this dent was giving me back. From doing this I could
tell very quickly that I was dealing with some pretty sharp locked in metal
here, so I decided to start off with a much more rigid tip so I went for my
standard nylon tip. Now as the dent had equal tension down the whole crease I
decided to come down from the top to start pushing this crease out using the
hard nylon tip and the support of my hand. I slowly pushed the crease out
little by little, I continued using the heat as this metal needed to be pushed
out with a lot of force. So as you can see the dent is reducing in size
although it will need a lot of work to get this completely straight. Again now
when pushing up metal as tight as this inevitably we will get some high areas
so these are tapped back down again. I'm using my Aluminium knock down here and
I'm using it with a nylon tip.
So after some initial pushing up and tapping back down again I've managed to get
as far as this. What's interesting is that now some of these crease has come up
we can see that the force of the impact has even left its mark in the paintwork
this in itself will be a challenge to try and remove. Now using some heat again
I'm going to soften the paint up in this area so I can try and push the body line
back out straight again. I'm still using my nylon tip on my screw on tip bar. I'm
putting a tremendous amount of force into this dent and it's giving me very
little in return, this is because the metal in this dent is completely locked
up and just doesn't want to move, I also have to be very careful as if I push too
hard near the edge I can blow out the wheel arch profile and potentially split
the metal underneath. That's why I'm using my hand here for support. I'm using
a variety of different knockdowns in this repair as there are very different
types of high areas to deal with some are very sharp highs and some are larger
more gradual crowns. Now the edge profile is coming back although not cleanly
enough for my liking and we still have this area on the flat part of the wheel
arch to deal with. So we've plenty more heat and some hard pushes from behind I
continue on pushing up the tight areas of this dent and there are several low
areas across the whole face of this wheel arch. Using my nylon tap down I continue
removing any sharp areas. So let's have a quick review of where we are so far. Now
I know it doesn't look pretty but with some of these challenging dents
sometimes they have to look worse before they start looking better.
Now it's time to deal with some of the large low areas around the perimeter of
this dent. Using some heat i soften the paint before I go in underneath with my
large rubber tip, using this tip I move around this low area in order to bring
it up level again with the surrounding metal. Fortunately this metal is much
easier and softer to push up than the sharp crease beside it. Using my nylon
tap down I go across all the areas of the panel that are too high and bring
them back down level again. I then use my Aluminium hammer with a large rubber tip
to address any high crowns still present on the panel.
Now to have got the dent even to this stage I think was an achievement as the
metal was completely stretched and locked up so I had to use quite a few
advanced techniques in order to gather the metal up and Cold shrink it. Now comes
the painstaking task of trying to reduce this heavy texture and blend it back in
with the original orange peel texture of the paintwork, so to achieve this I'm
using some sharp tips and some sharp tap downs.
So the texture is reducing but there is plenty more work to be done pushing up
all these very small micro lows.
As always I'm making sure I work the dent from all angles, this will ensure
they look straight from every direction as you can see I'm using lots of heat
lots of pushes and lots of tapping down to get this down back level again.
Now normally on a really bad stretched crease like this it's unavoidable creating
some texture on the panel and normally this can be flatted back down with some
fine paper and polished to blend it back in again. However as this green paint had
very little thickness to it, I was unable to sand this back so I could only polish
off any hammer marks made from the dent removal process instead.
So now it's time to check out the FINAL RESULT!
Okay so in terms of what I was working with here this was the absolute best I
could do with this repair but considering how stretched and creased
this panels was in the first place. It wasn't a bad result, it saved the
customer losing this vehicle in a body shop and potentially costing him a lot
business. So as I mentioned before in the video, I was trying to get the texture in
this repair as fine as possible so I could wet sand it and polish it to
smooth it all out but unfortunately this green painted section here had hardly
any thickness to it, I tested a section underneath the wheel arch with some
superfine wet and dry sanding paper and it's sanded straight through. So it just
couldn't risk wet sanding the top section of this wheel arch, so I had to
leave some texture behind, but I made sure it was absolutely minimal. There was
another bit of damaged paint on the top section of the wheel, arch but with all
the paint defects that were left on the panel I reduced them as best as I could.
Well thanks again for watching, I really hope you enjoyed watching me tackle this
difficult dent. If you like the video, it would be great to get a thumbs up, and if you
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Thanks for watching and I'll see you all on the next video!