Paintless Dent Removal

Crashnburn

Crashnburn

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Crashnburn
I saw a plane for sale lately that has some hail damage. I researched how to remove dents, and there's a technology called Paintless Dent Removal. It's restricted to non-ferrous metal (like aluminum.

Essentially, there is a device that sits on one side of the dent. It generates two electromagnetic fields, one on each side of the dented metal. The field on the far side is induced by the field on the near side. The field on the near side is quickly switched off and it collapses. The collapsing field causes the far field to try to penetrate the metal, and the field actually pulls the metal out, reducing, and most likely, removing the dent.

I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with PDR, and what the actual cost of PDR is. I'm guessing there would be a travel charge, plus a per dent charge, but I don't know.
 
PDR works for steel too. The guy has a bunch of thin metal rods with rounded points and he just pops all the hail dents back out. Had it done on a car that was hailed on when only a year old. I thought it would turn into a rust bucket but twelve years later that has not been the case.
 
Car PDR is almost an art. It is remarkable how well it works when someone really good does it. I’m not familiar with the magnet method.
 
I've had a lot of experience with Paintless Dent Repair. In the auto body industry. PDR works best when they can use the rods that have already been described and can access the dent from the back side. I'm obviously a lot more familiar with the PDR method on cars than planes, but I think like cars there would be plenty of places on planes where they could access the dent from the backside, and plenty where they cant.

The most common way to remove a dent with PDR when they cant access the back side is with a technique called glue pulling. Using a hot glue gun, they glue a plastic tab to the center of the dent, and then pull the dent that way. If it created a high spot they then lightly tap that down. A downside with glue pulling is it takes longer, and if the paint is weak, it can pull the paint off where it was glued.

I've also seen induction heating, but that inst real effective in my experience.

Most vehicles are traditionally steel, but plenty of manufacturers are moving towards aluminum which means most PDR technicians have plenty of experience with ALU.

As far as pricing goes, Market will dictate that a lot. My suggestion is if you can to wait until winter. The winter weather means you may not be flying it as much but more importantly the PDR technicians wont be as busy and you will have a better chance negotiating a price that may be more to your liking.

On a small door ding the size of a quarter on a vehicle, you could plan on spending 75-100 dollars. Hail damaged cars often cost 4K+ depending on severity.
 
As for cost, I seem to remember $3 per hail ding. There was a setup charge to pull the interior and some aluminum trim pieces that had to be replaced. Total about 3k for 900 dents.

The only long-term problem in the car is that the interior has never been quite the same. Getting all the plastic trim pieces over the airbag inflators to fit exactly right is not easy and now 12 years later the headliner is pulling loose in places.
 
Crashnburn said:
I saw a plane for sale lately that has some hail damage. I researched how to remove dents, and there's a technology called Paintless Dent Removal. It's restricted to non-ferrous metal (like aluminum.

Essentially, there is a device that sits on one side of the dent. It generates two electromagnetic fields, one on each side of the dented metal. The field on the far side is induced by the field on the near side. The field on the near side is quickly switched off and it collapses. The collapsing field causes the far field to try to penetrate the metal, and the field actually pulls the metal out, reducing, and most likely, removing the dent.

I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with PDR, and what the actual cost of PDR is. I'm guessing there would be a travel charge, plus a per dent charge, but I don't know.
Click to expand...

I think you mean EDR, electromagnetic dent removal.

The old fashion way is bonding a tool over the dent and using a slide hammer to pull it out.
 
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