Have you ever had a body shop remove very minor dings, scratches, chips on your vehicle? What did it cost you?
My 3 year-old son decided to take a rock and draw a hairline scratch down the side of the car.
Be prepared for a shock. I asked a body shop, that had previously done work for me, about taking out a small scratch on a door panel. Estimate was around six hundred and fifty bucks. Evidently it involves repainting the entire door.
Scratch is still there.
If it’s not too deep, they can wetsand it and it will not cost much, probably between 50 - 100 dollars.
My repair involved wet sanding. The problem was that the shop said it was necessary to either spend a lot of time blending the repair color, or paint the entire door. If I recall, the blending process took multiple coats, with drying each time, making total repaint actually less complicated.
If anybody comes up with a simple process that works, I’m all ears!!!
Also if I recall properly, the process proposed by the ship would result in an invisible repair. If one is willing to settle for less, the cost should be much reduced. However, if you’ve got a scratch down the entire side of your car, this might not be too satisfactory.
Please let us know how it all turns out.
I’ve read on-line on how to fix them yourself using rubbing compound and buffing them out. I figured since I didn’t know how to do this myself a body shop may use the same method and charge me less than $100.
The scratch may only be in the clearcoat, in which case, you may find that a good waxing hides it. If you wet it, and it disppears, you’re probably in luck.
If the scratch has gone through the paint and into the primer, that’s when you get into some substantial labor costs. If you wet the scratch and it stays white, you have three basic options -
Do nothing at all (free!)
Try one of those “color matching” waxes (about ten bucks)
Have the car repainted (ouch!)
It depends on how perfect you want the end result to be. Body shops almost always give you a quote for the way to get everything back to perfect condition even though 95% may be just fine for most people. For dings, paintless dent removal can be a miracle. I had a ding that wasn’t severe but about 16 inches long which was the upper limit of what the specialist was willing to work with. He was definitely talented and used a series of specialized picks and other techniques to pull it back into shape over the course of an hour. I watched him work just because I was so fascinated. After he was done, you couldn’t tell there was anything wrong from 2 feet away and it cost a small fraction of the price the body shop wanted.
I’m interested in this as well. I’ve got a Mustang and just got my first ding. It is on the “flare” of the back wheel well so should be easy to get to. There doesn’t appear to be any paint damage, just an even round dent.
Aren’t toddlers exciting? Check out this link for more detailed information.
A few years ago a mechanic told me that sometimes with a small dent, you can hold an ice cube on it and it might pop out. I don’t know if it’s true, or dependent on the extreme heat we get here in AZ, or what.
As for scratches, I bought a little bottle of matching paint from the dealership for my car, and it hides very minor scratches well enough for me, and was only 12 bucks.
The mechanic may not have said ice cubes but dry ice dent removal is a legitimate technique.
We’ve had some scratches repaired by a high end auto detailer who said he used an airbrush to fix it. I didn’t actually watch, so I can’t confirm exactly what he did, but it looks perfect (it’s been over a year since the repair and it still is totally undetectable) and it was WAY cheaper than a body shop repair.