Paintless Dent Removal

My wife mistook the home workshop for a garage last week, and parked her brand new car in there.

About 30 minutes into the car's new life with us, I managed to drop a PVC pipe onto the panel above the door, leaving a nasty dent.

Not being one to miss a learning opportunity, I wondered... how does paintless dent removal actually work? A few hours on the 3D printer later, I have to say - pretty well!

I couldn't find any stories of success, but there's a first for everything I suppose. After a bit of browsing I opted to download the pull tabs from Thingiverse user gindul, here.

Figuring some pull-direction strength might work out more important than a clean print, I Iaid it on its side and added supports everywhere.

Turns out the 10x15 is really small, so I printed a few of the 16x25 too.

For the pull handle, I went with Bcjams's design, here. I printed it as it comes, which is on the side with no need for supports.

With a couple of spares and different sized options in hand, I rolled out the extension cord and warmed up my trusty hot glue gun. I also gave the surface a squirt with some Isopropyl Alcohol and quickly wiped off the excess before it ran into the rubber door seals.

I started with a tab on either side of the dent centreline, figuring that would give me the most leverage for the least pull. To get a straight, strong pull, I stood on a step and basically pulled hard enough to pop the tab off. This worked quite nicely, and I continued to refine the pulls with smaller tabs from slightly different positions. In between applications I cleaned with the IPA, and peeled off the glue residue from the tabs.

In the course of seven or eight pulls I snapped the surface of a couple of tabs, whether by a slightly offline pull or just because. But there was enough spares to get the job done, so I think the horizontal print direction was just the ticket to provide the strength I needed.

It all went rather well. The dent is out, but there are still some fine ridges. So I printed up a knock down tool from gippgrillz. I picked variant "1" and printed it at 10x size, laying down.

Alas I was intercepted at this point by the car owner, who found the tool's appearance a little too threatening for her brand new Mercedes, and vetoed its application. Thus ends my brief but rewarding career in Paintless Dent Removal.