I don't know that I would repair it. Maybe a good cleaning, claybar, waxing, and sealant may be better than a $400 paint job. Sure it will be indented, but it's time vs. money at this point.

I have those marks on my passenger side rear door from an assclown at the airport that hit my car. After a good cleaning I know they are there but it's not as noticeable.

 

So do they have to bondo or fill the scratch with something? I imagine that's what's necessary because it's indented. I was wondering if I wouldn't have to repaint the whole thing because it was just repainted. Wouldn't it make it easy to blend the paint because of that? I don't know.

 

If it dented the trunk if would have to be filled or at least popped from the back. Id imagine the whole trunk would have to be repainted as its hard to paint just a spot like that and have it blend well...

 

I had an estimate on a similarly small dent on my trunk. $400-500. They have to fix the dent a repaint the entire piece in order to do it right.

Luckily I didn't scratch my paint and I know a good a PDR guy. He fixed it like new for a couple hundred bucks.

 

Jesus ...$500?

With all of 1,000 miles on the odo, I backed my car into a concrete barrier (poor visibility in dimly-lit parking garage). I creased the bumper, ripped a small piece of plastic and cracked the chrome trim piece at the bottom of the rear bumper. I took it to a place near Chicago that charged me all of $90 for the touch-up / fix.

No, it wasn't show quality ...but from anything greater than 6" away, you'd never know I'd had anything done. You should be able to find someone that can doo a good job with airbrush touches or something similar.

 

Jesus ...$500?

With all of 1,000 miles on the odo, I backed my car into a concrete barrier (poor visibility in dimly-lit parking garage). I creased the bumper, ripped a small piece of plastic and cracked the chrome trim piece at the bottom of the rear bumper. I took it to a place near Chicago that charged me all of $90 for the touch-up / fix.

No, it wasn't show quality ...but from anything greater than 6" away, you'd never know I'd had anything done. You should be able to find someone that can doo a good job with airbrush touches or something similar.

I hear where you're comming from, and it depends on how anal you are about the damage.

Its the difference between fixing it like it never happened and doing your best to minimize the blemish.

When you dent the trunk like that, regardless of whether you scratch the paint, the light is going to refract differently off of the dent and it will be noticable from certain distances and angles no matter how you paint it. You can try to hide it, and can probably do a damn good job at it, but its not going to dissapear as if it never happened. Also, when you use touch up paint, the older that temporary fix gets, the more noticable it will become because of the fact that the touch up paint will age much faster than the factory paint job. That means you have to keep touching that area up to hide the damage. So, while you can hide it fairly well for next to nothing, you can't make it go away for next to nothing.

To make it go away, it will be $400-500 (at least in my area) because to get a professional blend on the paint they will need to paint the entire rear portion of the trunk, if not the whole thing. That involves prep, debadging, filling, clear coat, etc. Its the pait job that takes up the majority of that $500. When I dented my trunk, I took it to two reputable body shops. One quoted me $400, and the other $500. Both the body shops said the dent was too big for PDR.


What they didn't know was that the guy I hired to do the PDR work was a genius, and perfectionist to boot. He was working on the car for about an hour after I couldn't see the dent anymore. He was breaking down how the light refracts off of the "orange peel" qualities of the paint and if you don't get it just right you will be able to tell it was damaged from certain angles. But he said that if you scratch the paint, he reccomended a traditional fix because its the paint repair that costs the most money. Because the PDR work is more costly than filling the dent, PDR is only economical if there is no paint damage. So, if you scratch the paint, you either have to touch it up and live with it, or go balls out and fix it right.

Anyway, I guess the point is that to fix the car to the point where its as good as it was before the damage, you have to fork out a ton of cash.

 

I hear where you're comming from, and it depends on how anal you are about the damage.

Absolutely true. My car was a workhorse that was going to see anywhere between 25k and 30k miles a year - getting it back to showroom perfection simply wasn't worth it. (As it turns out, I did 28k miles in the first year and then sold it.)

For me, the good-but-not-great fix was a far better value than the mad-scientist-who-does-body-repair approach. You gotsta do what's right for you. :thumbup:

 

It it a bare metal scratch, or just a scuff/surface scratch?

If it's on the surface, just remove the scratch with a scratch remover ot buffing compound, then have a paintless dent removal place take out the dent. Probably less $100. :thumbup: