How To Fix Dents Yourself So You Can Avoid An Expensive Repair Bill

Finding a fresh dent in your pristine car can feel like a punch in the gut. And no matter how careful you are and how much you baby your ride, you're bound to experience the pain of an unexpected dent eventually. Thankfully, many dents are easy to repair on your own with just a little bit of know-how and the right tools. While there are many parts of cars that even experienced DIYers shouldn't tackle on their own, fixing dents is mostly harmless, and failure doesn't run much risk of increasing the repair bill by a lot.

The first method to try when doing your own dent repair is a real DIYer's special. It may look janky while you're doing it, but you can't argue with the results. First, determine whether you can access the other side of the panel where the dent is. This is easiest on plastic bumpers, but it can be done on metal and in other sections of the vehicle. Boil a pot of water and then pour it over the dented area to heat the dented material. If that's not feasible, try using a hair dryer to heat the area instead. Then, simply push from the inside and see if the dent pops out. It may sound crazy, but trust the process.

If that method doesn't prove fruitful, your next step is to reheat the area. For a plastic dent, you can spray compressed air on the heated area to rapidly cool it and force the material to pop back out. For a dent in either plastic or metal, try busting out your plunger. Suction it to the heated dent and start pulling. It should pop out relatively quickly. On metal, this may only be enough to shrink the dent.

If the above methods don't work, there are a couple of DIY approaches to try. The first thing you'll want to do is buy a dent repair kit, which usually costs from around $35. Inside these specialized kits, you'll find what's called a bridge tool or a dent lifter. This suction-based tool works a lot like the plunger method above, but it's custom-built for the job at hand.

A hand-held dent lifter is about the size and shape of a staple gun, and it has two padded feet on either side of a dent-pulling attachment, which features a plastic part (often a suction cup) at the end of a retractable rod. Most versions of this tool use hot glue to adhere the cup to the surface of the car, but that's not always necessary. To use the tool, you mount the feet on either side of the dent and extend the rod until the suction cup has a firm grip on the center of the dent. Then you begin retracting the rod, which slowly pulls the dent out. While this is a bit involved, it's nowhere near as demanding as something like plastic welding for car repairs.

It's also possible to repair a dent using body filler — aka Bondo – which can be purchased for just a few bucks. This putty doesn't exactly fix a dent so much as it allows you to convincingly hide it. You'll need to sand off your car's paint, apply and shape the body filler, then sand it down until it's smooth enough to glaze and paint. Make sure to first pull out the dent as much as you can using the dent lifter method. When done right, you'll hardly know the filler is there.

Not all dents are made equal, and — truth be told — not all of them are feasible or safe to fix without professional help. The dent repair methods outlined above are all effective and safe, but they are useful only for less serious dents. Dings and small dents that don't pose any safety concerns can all be comfortably fixed using such methods, and DIYing the project can save you money, both in the short term and the long term. That's because even small dents can lead to bigger issues that are harder and more expensive to fix down the line. For example, they risk allowing moisture to infiltrate and begin rusting the metal or destroying the paint. The same is true of sharp dents, which are both harder to fix and more likely to cause damage. Even if you do fix a sharp dent, like those from low-surface-area impacts, such as car doors and shopping carts.

Crease dents, which are marked by long folds in the car's exterior, and other large dents probably warrant professional help. Firstly, because they're commonly accompanied by significant damage to the paint and clear coat, but also because they could be hiding structural damage, too. Simply pulling out the dent won't fix any underlying issues, and professionals are better-equipped to diagnose and treat such problems. Of course, there's a YouTuber building a brand new 1967 Ford Mustang from the ground up, so there's nothing impossible about you performing intensive dent repairs on your own car. It's just probably not worth the hassle. Seriously, see a professional if there's any risk that your dent is related to a larger problem or if it takes more than a handful of hours to do on your own.