Take a walk around any car show-field or cruise night, and you will see beautifully restored cars everywhere. It's a given, people enjoy showing off their cars they have restored. But unlike the TV shows portray, making a rusted or banged-up wreck look like new does not happen in a week. what does it really take to make a car with less than perfect sheetmetal look like a show stopper?
There are plenty of body shop tool companies out there that will sell you the tools you need, but they very seldom come with instructions on how to use them. we can't dedicate an entire issue to showing how to use all the tools required, but we can show you what it takes to properly remove a dent-in this case, a dent in a front fender. Countless articles have been written about how to replace a piece of metal that's rusty, but what if you just found a cherry fender at a swap meet that only needs a dent removed?
We grabbed the Eastwood Restorations catalog to see what it would take to get the proper tools for such a repair, and what it might cost for said tools. If you're only going to fix one car in your lifetime, you may not want the expense of buying the tools we did, but maybe you and a friend have a couple of cars you will ultimately be working on. With that said, I have yet to meet a person that decides they are going to rebuild one car and stop there. It doesn't happen.
So what does it take to do a simple dent repair on a fender? We already had a hand grinder, so we ordered a couple of sanding blocks and the requisite sandpaper, and one handy dent puller. In years gone by, holes were drilled into the dent in the fender, and a slide hammer with either a hook or a sheetmetal screw in the end of it was inserted into the hole, and the dent was pulled out. Once that was done, you both welded up and smoothed the holes, or some guys even left the holes and smeared body filler over the area. This dent puller we have is a lot better fix as it doesn't need a hole in the metal, and therefore, less work is required.
Well, enough talking about the fix, let's get to showing you how to do it.
