Prologue

Origins of Pushing Metal

I want to tell you why paintless dent repair matters to me before I tell you how to do it. Because what we do is not really a new trade. The automobile is new. The paint is new. The lights, glue, rods, tabs, and tools we use are new. But the basic thing we do, working metal with our hands and persuading it to take the shape we want, is almost as old as civilization itself. The Bible introduces the metalworker surprisingly early. In Genesis, only a few generations removed from Adam, we meet Tubal Cain, a man remembered specifically because he worked bronze and iron (Gen. 4:22). Think about that for a moment. Scripture is still describing the earliest generations of human civilization, and already there is a man whose identity is connected with his ability to work metal. Humanity had begun to specialize. Some raised livestock. Some made music. And some learned what metal would do under the hands of a skilled craftsman.

That craft never disappeared. When God instructed Israel to build the tabernacle, Bezalel was given wisdom and skill for craftsmanship that included working in gold, silver, and bronze (Exod. 31:2–5). Generations later, when Solomon prepared to build the temple, he specifically sought a craftsman skilled in gold, silver, bronze, and iron (2 Chron. 2:7). By the time we reach the New Testament, Paul can still identify a man simply by his trade: “Alexander the coppersmith” (2 Tim. 4:14). Alexander did Paul considerable harm, so he is hardly presented as an example to imitate, but it’s also the first recorded Google review and it involves metal work. The point is that the skillful metalworker has always been there. Kingdoms had risen and fallen, centuries had passed, and men were still earning their living by knowing how to work metal. In fact, metal has been so important to human civilization that we use it to name entire periods of our history. We speak of the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. We do not speak of a Wood Age or a Diamond Age. Metal became one of the technologies by which civilizations changed. A people who understood how to heat it, shape it, sharpen it, join it, and repair it possessed knowledge that was the cutting edge of technology.

Therefore, paintless dent repair belongs, in its own small way, to that very long story. We are not smelting bronze beside an ancient furnace, and we are not hammering iron on an anvil for swords. We are standing beside an automobile with a light and a tool in our hands and using swords to fix dents.

That is why I encourage you to stop thinking about paintless dent repair as just removing dents. It is metalworking. It is a modern expression of one of humanity’s oldest technical crafts and professions. The tools have changed enormously. The material has become thinner, stronger, coated, engineered, and formed by machines that the ancient smith could never have imagined. But beneath all of that technology remains something wonderfully old: a craftsman, a piece of metal, and the learned ability to shape it.

Yet, this is an invisible science. You’re not going to find a shield or piece of art after you finish your work. When you are done the goal is to appear as though nothing is there at all. No filler. No paint. No evidence that you were ever there. You either restore it or you do not, and the results can’t lie, even if you’re able to get a customer to accept it. I have never found another trade that answers you so plainly, or so quickly, or so publicly. The results of your repairs say more about you and your personal excellence than any other profession.

Cast, or hammered

In 1907 an Englishman named Paul Hasluck set out to write down everything a man could do to metal by hand, before modern machines took over. He basically said that metalwork falls into two broad classes: cast and hammered.¹ Casting pours metal into the shape you want it to have. Hammering persuades metal that already exists into a shape it did not have before. Two families, as old as bronze, which Hasluck rightly calls a distinct advance in the history of civilisation.¹ Everything this trade does sits on the hammered side of that line. It always has.

Raised from the back

Go further into the same book, to the chapter on repoussé. Hasluck defines it in one sentence, and I would like you to read that sentence twice: “Repoussé is the art of raising designs on sheet metal, and the pattern is formed from the back by means of hammers and punches.”² That is, within the vein of metal working you pushing and tapping. The shape of the tool from being pushed into the metal and then being hammered out. He would work the metal from behind with a punch he made himself, reading the front of the metal with his eye to learn what his hand had just done on the other side. You do the same thing, on a door skin, every single car. The metal is different. The purpose is different. The method is the same method.

Formed from the back. A silversmith in 1500 and a dent technician in a car park are doing the same thing.

The secret that was never a secret

Hasluck then says something that stopped me cold the first time I read it. Of repoussé, he reports that for many years the exceedingly simple processes were kept quite a trade secret, and jealously guarded against all intruders, though he adds, drily, that he cannot understand how. Even the tools could not be bought: it was customary for the embossers, as they were called, to make their own as needed.³ Which is why every professional paintless dent repair technician should in my opinion have the ability to create all of your own tools. There are lots of people who are gate keepers that don’t want to train techs and still most of the best tools in this industry cannot be purchased. Either way there are lots of similarities. Simple processes, guarded. Knowledge passed by favour rather than by writing. Men making their own tools because the trade had not organised itself enough to sell them. Our worst habit is not our invention.

Our secrecy is not a business strategy. It is a bad habit four centuries old.

The men who bumped metal

Come forward to the car. In 1953, a tool company in Fort Worth, Texas, published the third edition of a manual by Frank Sargent called The Key to Metal Bumping. It is a book about hammers, dollies, files and lead. It is also, in places, this book. Sargent's method begins at the far edge of the damage, and removes the ridges and V channels one by one in the reverse order in which they were formed.⁴ That is the central rule of this trade, in print seventy years before most of you were born. He had noticed something else too. On one fender he reckons seventy per cent of the damaged area needs work and the other thirty per cent will flex back to shape on its own, because it was never bent past its elastic limit.⁵ The point is that he knew about springback. They had a rough number for it. They built a working method around it, and then they filled the rest with lead and painted over the evidence. We inherited the analysis. We threw away the filler.

This has happened before

Sargent's foreword carries a warning. His company's first manual appeared in 1931 and was revised in 1935. Then, he writes, the all steel body arrived, followed by the turret top, and the trade underwent a change of major proportions, obsoleting all of the woodworking, and many of the metal working techniques of the early period.⁶ A generation of skilled men woke up to find that their material had changed underneath them and their methods had quietly expired. It is happening again, and this time no one is paying attention, at least not yet. The metals are changing but more importantly all of the electronics are changing. Cars are becoming more like computers than cars. The more circuitry that they pack into these automobiles the more we have to know.

This book begins in earnest with the metal, it’s the most logical place to start but behind all of that metal we must consider the electronics.

The chapter after this one is about metal: nine families of automotive steel, two series of aluminium, and the tool alloys our trade has never bothered to name. A bake hardened skin under a millimetre thick. Aluminium that returns roughly three times harder at comparable strength. Boron steel in the pillar behind your elbow that will not answer a rod at all, and was heat treated so that it would not. The hand is the same hand. The metal is not the same metal. That sentence is the reason this book exists.

So when you pick up a rod, know what you are joining. Not a niche of the collision industry. A line of people who have been persuading metal for six thousand years: founders, smiths, armourers, silversmiths, embossers, coachbuilders, panel men. Almost none of them wrote any of it down, and the ones who did were selling hammers. I am writing it down. Not because I am the best of them. Because somebody in this generation has to, and because a craft with no literature begins again from the beginning with every apprentice, and this one has begun again too many times already.

I am not the first. I would like to be among the first to write it down.

Notes

1. “Metalwork of all kinds is readily divisible into two broad classes: cast and hammered.” On bronze: “the use of copper and tin marked a most distinct advance in the history of civilisation.” Paul N. Hasluck, Metalworking: Old-Fashioned Tools, Materials, and Processes for the Handyman (London, 1907), 1–2. ↩
2. “Repoussé work is the art of raising designs on sheet metal… the ornamental design or pattern is formed from the back by means of hammers and punches.” Paul N. Hasluck, Metalworking: Old-Fashioned Tools, Materials, and Processes for the Handyman (London, 1907), 329. ↩
3. “For many years, it is said, the exceedingly simple processes were kept quite a trade secret, and jealously guarded against all intruders, though how this could be so is difficult to understand. Even the tools could not be purchased, it is said, it being customary for the ‘embossers,’ as they used to be called, to make them for themselves as occasion arose.” Paul N. Hasluck, Metalworking: Old-Fashioned Tools, Materials, and Processes for the Handyman (London, 1907), 329. ↩
4. “He removes the ridges and V-channels one by one in the reverse order in which they were formed.” Frank T. Sargent, The Key to Metal Bumping, 3rd ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Tool & Forge Division, Fairmount Sprocket & Gear, 1953), 13. ↩
5. “About seventy percent of the area of the damage in the rear fender in figure 9 will require repair work. The other thirty percent will flex back to shape… It is not bent beyond the elastic limit.” Frank T. Sargent, The Key to Metal Bumping, 3rd ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Tool & Forge Division, Fairmount Sprocket & Gear, 1953), 7. ↩
6. “Our first manual of body and fender repair was published in 1931. This was revised in 1935. With the advent of the all steel body, followed by the turret top, the trade underwent a change of major proportions, obsoleting all of the woodworking, and many of the metal working techniques of the early period.” Frank T. Sargent, The Key to Metal Bumping, 3rd ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Tool & Forge Division, Fairmount Sprocket & Gear, 1953), foreword. ↩