Traditional or PDR? Which To Pick For Your Car Dent Repair?

When you’re hit with an unlucky hail storm, you need to know your options to get the best car dent repair! 

If you’ve already filed a claim with your insurance company, they will most likely recommend sending you to their affiliated body shops that are typically only equipped to use traditional repair methods. Or maybe you found a DIY PDR tutorial online because you don’t want to wait weeks to get your car fixed.  

But, are these the best options for you? In our experience, no, not really. 

To get the most out of your auto body hail repair, we believe in using Paintless Dent Repair performed by professionals -AKA, us. Let us explain why!   

Hail Specialists VS Other Repair Methods

	Hail Specialists	Traditional Body Shops	DIY PDR
Wait Time	1-3 Days	4-6 Weeks	Days or Weeks for Shipping
Price	$0	Full Deductible Amount	$50+ & Hidden Cost
Car Value	$0 Diminished Vehicle Value	Dimished Value Period
Lifetime Warranty
FREE Pickup/Drop off
FREE Claim Handling
FREE Door Ding Repair

Traditional Car Dent Repair:

Typically, your insurance company finds its partner body shop closest to you for a repair. But, the biggest question most people don’t ask is “how does a body shop repair hail damage?” 

Over here, we’ve outlined how traditional body shops might go about repairing your vehicle. While you might think it’s not a big deal to have your car fixed ‘traditionally’, these techniques are invasive to your car and the repair process is slow too. So, don’t be surprised if you end up waiting weeks to get your car back. 

Body fillers

1. Firstly, the body of your car is sanded down to remove the paint. 
2. Then, each dent is filled with a body filler paste and sanded back down to fit. 
3. As the last step, your car is then repainted.

Remove and replace

1. Firstly, the panels on your vehicle are unbolted and uninstalled.
2. After that, they are then replaced with expensive parts when deemed too damaged. 
3. Lastly, your car is repainted.

Traditional heat repair

For traditional heat repair, it is normally used on older and thicker paneled vehicles. 

1. Firstly, a quick appraisal is done to determine if this method is needed.
2. After that, the metal on your car is heated up to a point where an oxyacetylene torch is used to reshape the metal. 
3. When the metal cools back down, the body shop retouches and repaints the metal. 

All three processes listed above can take weeks. So that means you will be car-less as your car will be sitting in the body shop, waiting for replacement parts to arrive. Because of how long traditional methods take to repair dents in body shops, it might take weeks -or sometimes months if it was a big storm- to even schedule an appointment. Then, it could be another few weeks without your car as they order your car parts.

On top of all this, getting a new paint job will significantly decrease the value of your car. And you even end up waiting weeks to repair your car!   

Do-It-Yourself Paintless Dent Repair

DIY hail damage repair kits really aren’t a good repair option. Even though they may seem budget-friendly, there are hidden costs and damage that come when the repair is not done by a professional. 

We get it, cheap repair kits seem to hold so many promising and alluring benefits when we’re tight on cash. But, when you don’t fully understand what you are doing, you can easily damage your car even further. It then becomes an unnecessary cost that you need to fix. 

We have seen time and time again vehicles damaged beyond our capabilities because of a DIY job gone wrong. This repair is alluring with a quick cover-up for your dents, but this repair won’t last a lifetime like professionally done Paintless Dent Repair! 

Paintless Dent Repair at Hail Specialists: 

So, after reading all about traditional body shop methods and the underlying issues with DIY kits, you might be wondering: do fast repairs even exist? 

Well, yes, they do only when you use Paintless Dent Repair, also known as PDR. 

This method is great for many reasons. Rather than waiting weeks for your car to get out of the shop, PDR allows for a fast 1 to 3 day turn around rate on every repair. 

At Hail Specialists, our experienced technicians perform PDR with these three easy steps: 

1. Firstly, every vehicle will be inspected using a special PDR light. It allows for every shadow to pop out so we can indicate where even the smallest of dents are. 
2. Then, we access the back of each dented panel. 
3. Lastly, to finish it off, we gently apply pressure to work out each dent. 

But -take note that PDR is not a method that you can find just anywhere. It’s a specialized method that takes years to master for a flawless finish. Over at Hail Specialists, each of our technicians have been working in the PDR industry for at least 10 years, and many of them have been using it for longer! In total, our technicians have over 600 years of combined experience working with PDR so we know a thing or two about what’s best for your car for hail repair. 

Hail repair shouldn’t be intrusive and we ensure that with PDR. When you leave our location with your car in its pre-hail condition, dents will be the last thing on your mind!   

So why don’t you leave it to the professionals to get rid of your car dents if you’re located in a city near us? Call us now at 737-274-0500 to start your repair process or request your free assessment here!

We’re currently located at these cities below: