Professional Paintless Dent Removal and Rust

[alfredeneumann]

Hi, I have a question and don`t want to come off sounding too too paranoid. See I have a few small dents (about 5 of them) on different parts of my car - door panel, trunk hood, front quarter panel, etc. I would be interested in taking it to a professional paintless dent removal place and having them try to fix these dents. The problem is, from what I have seen is that these places use rods and levers to push the dents out from behind. The thing is, the only thing I hate more than dents and bad paint is RUST. If they`re using rods, say in door panel (I assume they are sneaking them in where the window goes) and pushing against the metal from inside, I am sure they will scrape any inside paint or coating. Several years from now I am sure that rain from the window and just moisture in general will act on that inside scrape, cause rust, and I will eventually have a hole in that door panel from rust. Is that a realistic assumption or not?



Generally I don`t like people opening things and taking parts off the car to get to things inside because usually I have a hard time trusting people that they will do it carefully enough so as not to scrape any existing paint, coating, etc. Because if they scrape anything, then rust will set in pretty soon.



Can anyone share their experiences with this - and particularly in respect to scratches from the rods and resulting rust?



Also, one more question. On one of the dents, the paint is beginning to crack at the top of the fold. The crack is about the size of a needle head. Can this dent be repaired or does this indicate that rust has already attacked the metal and thus I need to sand off all the paint in that point and the surrounding area and then primer, paint, and clear coat before I can have that dent repaired? Note that all of this was not my fault. I bought the car used (2 year old car) and I do not know how long the dent has been there. I was not the negligent one in this case, just to be clear.

[BobD]

Yeah, I think you are just being too paranoid. ;) Think about your other option, a body shop, who is either going to hire a PDR guy to do it, do PDR themselves, or repaint it, where they will still have to remove things and now you run the risk of a crappy paint job, bad paint, body filler, paint not matching existing, and it will cost $$$$.



We`d have to see a picture or see it in person to make that call.

[Alexia]

If you are worried about the inside the door issue take the panel off after they are done and inspect it. If there is a scratch spray some quality primer over it and put the panel back on.



The cracked paint could be difficult to say with out seeing it. I have pushed dents back out that caused the crack to worsen or the paint immediately flake off from stress. Most of the time I found a small line of rust that had begun forming in the crack.

[Accumulator]

alfredeneumann- I`ve had PDR work done and I`ve *never* had a problem with them cracking the paint and thus opening the door to a rust-out. I *would* be sure to impress your concerns to the people doing the work though; I always figure that the way I come across helps a lot (they don`t want to mess up on *my* car ;) ).



The existing rust should be an easy enough fix since it`s such a small area. It`ll end up being like doing a paint chip, you just need to eradicate the rust first (so it`s nice a nice *fresh* paint chip). The trick will probably be to avoid messing up the surrounding paint more than necessary.



I`d tape off the area to make an "oops!" less likely. Then clean out the rust with either folded sandpaper or one of the abrasive fillament pens on the market (no link handy but we`ve discussed them here before...maybe search on my user name and "Micro Mark" as that`s the catalog I buy mine from).



Clean out the rust mechanically, then treat with a rust converter product, which will also act as primer. Then do the touch up and try to be satisfied with "better" instead of insisting on "perfect".



I did this type of repair on a few rusty to-the-metal chips on my Yukon after I bought it (in rather used condition) and they`ve stayed fixed. They don`t look as good as I`d like, but after a zillion tries I decided to live with `em...at least the paint is staying put and there`s no rust.

[alfredeneumann]

OK great. Thanks everyone for all the helpful responses. I feel much better about the situation now. Also, I have repainted another small area on the car from bare metal (sanded, cleaned, primered, painted with touchup paint), so I do have some experience with that, so this shouldn`t be too bad. Thanks a lot again to everyone.

[Accumulator]

Hope things work out OK. Oh, and a belated Welcome to Autopia!

[d.langenfed]

Another thing to consider is asking the PDR guy whether he glue pulls or not. If your car can handle it, (age of paint, depth of damage, etc) sometimes the dent can be removed without even using typical pdr rods.