DIY Car Body Repair

A while ago my father went to a shop and asked how much they would charge to fix this dent in the back of his SUV:

The answer: 600 Euros…

Being quite an old car, which he is not sure for how long will be kept, I suggested to just have a try ourselves at doing the job and seeing how it would turn out. If the result were good enough, we knew we had such possibility for future, maybe more expensive, damages. I’ll anticipate the conclusions: with roughly 60 Euros (a tenth of the shop’s quote!) we achieved what I would call a quite professional-looking result.

Steps

Our first step was re-embossing the flattened piece of body by dismantling the plastic interiors and hammering the metal back out. Apparently, this area had been plastered before, which resulted in big pieces of paint to crumble off:

No harm done though, we had to remove everything above bare metal anyway:

Next up, I filled the irregularities with automotive plaster and sanded it down to be as smooth and seamless as possible with the shape of the body.

The surface was now ready to be painted. Paint jobs in cars come in at least three steps:

• A base coat to provide better adhesion between paint and metal
• Two or more tint layers
• One or two clear coats for a shiny/metal finish and to protect the tint from scratches

The trick to a good finish (on any layer) I would say is to proceed with very thin layers, possibly more than 3 or 4. At first one should not even care for slightly uncovered spots, because they will get filled in subsequent hands.

As a side note, to obtain the perfect color we contacted several car parts stores, but since this particular tint was still in use by the original manufacturer, nobody could officially sell it. Instead, we found an online shop that, given the tint code, could replicate the original color, and boy did it satisfy our expectations!

Here’s how our experiment turned out:

There’s a slight gradient of shininess between the 15-year-old paint and the fresh new one, but after a while it degraded a bit and became barely noticeable.