Door Dings and Dents: Your Repair Options

Small dents vs. large dents

Three things decide how a dent is repaired:

• Is the paint intact? Unbroken paint opens up more options. Cracked or chipped paint means refinishing.
• How deep and sharp is it? A soft, shallow dent behaves very differently from a sharp crease where the metal has stretched.
• Where is it? Dents on body lines, panel edges or areas braced from behind are harder to reach and reshape.

Keeping the original finish

When a dent is shallow and the paint is unbroken, it can often be worked back into shape from behind the panel, gradually, until the surface is level again. Because nothing is sanded or painted, the original finish stays on the vehicle, and there is no color to match.

This works well for many door dings, parking-lot dents and hail dents. It does not work for every dent, and an honest assessment matters more than the method.

When refinishing is the right repair

Deep dents, sharp creases, dents on body lines and anything with damaged paint are repaired the traditional way: the panel is reshaped, any low spots are filled and sanded smooth, and the area is primed, painted and clear-coated. The new paint is blended into the neighboring panels so the repair does not show. Our paint and refinishing page explains color matching.

Aluminum panels

More vehicles now use aluminum hoods, doors and truck beds. Aluminum is lighter than steel but less forgiving to reshape, and it needs its own tools and techniques. Tell us the year, make and model in your estimate request, and we will explain how we would approach the repair.

How to photograph a dent

1. One photo straight on, from about arm’s length.
2. One photo at a low angle along the panel, so the reflection shows the shape of the dent.
3. One wider photo showing which panel it is on.
4. A close-up of any chipped or cracked paint.

Then send them with an estimate request. See dent removal for more on how we repair dents.