The technician

Paul Whitehorn

Paintless dent repair technician. Lakeland, Florida. Since 1999.

There are technicians with more certificates and technicians with more years. What is unusual here is the combination: a man who still repairs cars by hand every week, who wrote down the theory of how it is done, and who built the software the trade uses to run itself.

The record

• Vale Certified Master Craftsman II — The certification insurance adjusters read, and the estimating language hail claims are written in.
• ARC certified — Hail and retail paintless dent repair.
• Since 1999 — more than 14,000 vehicles — Twenty-seven years at the panel, and still on the panel.
• Author of The PDR Book — The first systematic treatment of paintless dent repair as theory rather than hand skill — a shared vocabulary for damage, the Single Solution Theory, minimum manipulation contacts, and the PDR5 framework.
• Creator of the Dent Repair USA app — Free estimating, invoicing, scheduling and hail mapping for technicians, on iPhone, Android and the web, in eleven languages.
• Repairs guaranteed to $1,000,000 per panel — Owner-operator: the man who writes the estimate is the man who fixes the car.
• US Army veteran — Combat veteran, and the source of more than one idea in the book.
• Pursuing a doctorate at Liberty University — Bible Exposition. Not conferred, and not related to dent repair — but it is where the habit of writing things down properly came from.

Why this matters to a customer

Most of the above is of no interest to somebody with a dented door. What it means in practice is simpler. A technician who has written down his own method is a technician who can tell you plainly what he is doing, what it will cost, and — the part that matters most — when paintless repair is the wrong answer and you should go to a body shop instead. A man who cannot explain his process cannot tell you where it stops.