Tuesday at Costco I got my first ding.
I always park in wide spaces, and have spent as much as ten minutes waiting for a safe place.
This time I got dinged by some airhead who rather than walk twenty feet to rack his cart, stuffed it up on the dirt berm at the uphill side of the lot.

It rolled into my truck hard enough to put a double dimple up under the mirror. This ding was in the worst part of the door where the metal is doubled back and riveted.



I stopped by a good local body shop on the way home.
585 bucks was the estimate.
That is about half what it cost my wife when her coupe got a door ding.
I was not very happy.
The guy who gave me the estimate also gave me a card for Swift Appearance of Wrightwood, a small company that does paintless ding removal.

I pulled the door panel off when I got home and discovered that you could not access the ding from inside the door, as it was up in the front where the skin of the door is wrapped back.

So I called the ding remover place and had him come out this morning.
He goes to your door, or wherever.

The ding was fairly deep, with two tiny dimples. Because my truck is rather waxed up, the ding was visible from a measured 100 feet…
The more your truck is waxed and shiny, the more a ding shows.
This is why you suddenly notice your unfixed dings when you have a used car painted.

I wasn’t too optimistic due to the double dimple and the bad location.

He worked on it for about 20 minutes. He did all the work with long tools through the window opening. Because of the location, and the type of tools he used there was no advantage or reason to remove the door panel.
When he was done the ding was gone.



In bright sunlight, looking up from about ten inches below the ding, I might be able to see the faintest of lines. It does not show in even super close photographs.
There is more variation from the metal flake of the paint.
The cost was under half of my deductible.

Nowadays we get a lot of dings with the super narrow parking spaces and the plain old bad manners and carelessness of many of our fellow citizens.
I’m glad that there is a solution that costs a LOT less than the conventional body shop.
Plus there were no worries that they screwed something else up while doing it.
I'm still gonna be careful where I park, but at least I know I can get the little ones fixed fairly cheap.

Next time, I'm checking paintless ding places before regular body shops...
Chris

 

I had some hail damage on the roof, hood, and all down the side of an 02 Silverado I owned. My insurance company told me that if I would take it to a dentless place, they would provide a rental and waive the deducable. It was a black truck and when they finished, you could not tell it had been touched. As long as the paint surface is not cracked or penatrated, it is amazing what they can do. Glad yours came out so well.