Thread: Hail storm..

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...as this relates to cars...

I hired a guy from Kansas many years ago. He told me that one of the things you get good at is shrinking the dents from hail storms, by heating them with a torch, then hitting them with a wet rag or ice. He said after a few dozen jobs, you can often get them so straight, you don't need any filler!

....which was a skill that is totally useless in Tucson, Arizona. :-)~

Yeah,a hail storm as vicious as that one tends to get good world wide coverage,but at the height of it,I dont think I would want to be out in it...actually,I dont think I would want to get hit by one of those at all...
HRP,back in the mid 90s,when I was still doing main stream repairs on late model/new cars,we had a virtually new Falcon come in from the Ford dealer,which had the top surfaces covered in very small dents,and we had to repair them and touch up the whole top side of the car...They were very small depressions,and on a white car,very hard to find them all..The dealer couldnt figure out what had happened,but while I was pulling the vent panel off from in front of the windscreen,I found a half dozen tiny acorns,,it turns out,that the car was left in the FOMOCO car park one night,under an old oak tree,and it got quite windy during the night....guess what...a little acorn or thirty falling about thirty feet....hmmm..
Incidentally,I would have liked to have seen that pickup that was parked outside on the street,after that hail storm...

I've heard that dry ice will get some smaller dents out but I've never had to try it - - - - I did find my Dodge Demon in the outdoor parking lot with the windshield busted out from a hail storm one afternoon after work. That one hour trip home on the Freeway was quite the experience.

Hailstones hitting You in the face would not be one of my favorite things! :-(

I've seen some hail down through the years, but never the magnitude displayed in that video. In 1962 I was stationed at the north end of Camp Pendleton, near San Clemente, and there was a hail storm that literally covered the ground, quite rare for California, and a guy in the outfit from Hawaii thought it was snow. It was quite a hoot watching him play in the stuff.

In the Puget Sound area in the spring we often get hail that will cover the ground like snow. but nothing like that.OMG

Jack.

I've seen a video clip of paintless dent removal where they heated the surface with a heat gun/hair dryer, then used a can of compressed air for computer dust removal upside down to expel the CO2. Waited as the frost disappeared from the surface and the dent came out with a "pop". Haven't tried it myself, but I know regular ice on a hot summer day doesn't work...

We had a pretty big hailstorm move through the KC metro some time back and the major insurance companies set up mobile drive through claim stations whereever they could find space. I took my wife's Astro van in with about 35 dents, and the examiner told me that a bit earlier he had a kid come in with deep pock marks all over the hood, top and trunk of his muscle car. The dents were amazingly consistent in size, which prompted the guy to get out his magnifying glass and bright light for a closer look. On the same spot in each dent he could see the letters "USA" in the paint, which he knew to be from a certain body hammer that had a raised USA origin stamp on the pick end. He asked the kid to look at the "hail damage" dents with his light and magnification, and wondered aloud about how Kansas did with insurance fraud.... The kid elected to leave without saying a word, according to the adjuster, who was still chuckling.

My brother and sister in law got hit by a hailstorm in the midwest a few years back. It practically destroyed their almost new Nissan pickup.... smashed the windshield and the sunroof. They both got cut by flying glass and were very lucky that their two-year old daughter escaped injury. Guess it scared the cr*p out of them.