I have a car in good shape except for a lot of small dents, mostly in the range of size of coins, some a bit bigger. The paint looks undamaged in these spots. I recall these “dent removal services” that, I think, pop them out rather than doing filler. Decades ago I was warned not to use them: the word was it broke the undercoat layer beneath the paint, and you’d eventually get a cancer spot. Was this advice true? Is it still true?
I have used painless dent removal several times with good results. IMHO, it does less damaging than disturbing the original paint and repainting. It’s also very cheap, about $100-200 for a typical dent.
The person that said not to use them was probably a regular body shop.
I’ve not seen any problems from it, and we use them quite a bit on hail storms. I really wish more shops would learn the technique, I believe it would save us a lot of money, but regular body work pays more, so I doubt they will.
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The place I use is a real mom and pop place run by a guy and his son. It’s in between a row of used car dealers, he does most of his work cleaning up cars for them.
How much does this cost per dent? Most of mine are small, more like “dings”.
Maybe $100 each for the small ones. Maybe you can get a better deal if you have a bunch of them fixed at once.
The person that said not to use them was probably a regular body shop.
Or it could have been somebody with no clue about what they were talking about.