Bedside Panel Dent Fix

I have a large dent in my passenger side bed panel and im trying to fix it. The body shop wants 1500$ to do it so my first thought was to buy a new bed for 900$-1400$ at a wreckage yard. Now im leaning more toward drilling the spot welds and getting a replacement panel for a couple hundered bucks but i cant seem to find any videos or write ups for the job. If anyone can point me in the direction of a good write up to help me out that would be awesome, or any general advice or help is always much appreciated. Thank you!

 

This seems to work! V

 

whatever you do don't bondo that, it will fall out in a few years. PO did that to me


I doubt there's any writeups, it seems pretty straightforward. You might have to remove the bed to get all of the spot welds drilled out but after doing that and pulling off the old side putting the new one in place and tacking the spots seems straightforward.


Have you checked craigslist? I occasionally see beds for $400-800.

 

"Next special occasion you should skip the flowers and get your girl a multipurpose tool!"

 

If $1500 included the paint I'd say let the bodyshop fix it. You're not going to be any further ahead by the time you drill out tons of spot welds and buy a bed side. IMO if they can fix this with a stud gun you'll end up with a better repair vs. drilling out spot welds

 

PDR...after they are done sand down the rust and primer.

:beer:

 

What is PDR?

 

Paintless dent removal

 

Then she wouldn't need me!

 

$1500 is not a bad price. In 2011 I had a shop repair my bed. It had a dent similar to yours. Since then it has been impossible to tell that the bed was ever dented. That price included the TRD sticker ($50) and a new 1/4-panel trim piece. They removed the bumper and moved the bed backwards to paint it, and the paint match is perfect. In my book, that was $1,500 well spent. Sure beats the shit out of welding, sanding, prepping, priming, painting, and adding the decal.

 

I did bodywork for about 10 years a long, long time ago. $1500 isn't a bad price at all especially since they have to paint it and get the paint to match. If they don't just buy a new bed side and weld it in there WILL be bondo. Contrary to a previous post, "Bondo" will last the life of the vehicle if applied properly. There are some VERY high quality "Bondo's out there but 3/8" is about as thick as you want it. Even though an inch of it will still outlast the car if applied properly. Back in the 80's I painted my own '74 Nova and slathered a couple of inches or more of Bondo all over that car where the rust holes were. I off roaded it constantly ( I was young and stupid at the time) for about 3 or 4 years years after that and then sold it before I went in the Navy. It never cracked or fell off. The same thing on a Caddy I owned for almost 20 years. It had tons of dough in it since it was originally from NJ. The only reason the dough started cracking was because of the rust I didn't get out behind it and it took over 10 years before that got noticeable. My point is, there is nothing wrong with a little dough. You'll never know it is there. If applied properly.

If you go to car shows and look at all the restored collector cars. Ever notice how many of them are straight as an arrow and all the gaps are perfect around the doors, hood and trunk lid? They do that by welding the edges of every panel and grinding them to fit. As far as the body waves in the older American classics? How do they get them so straight when they never came that way from the factory? They "dough" the entire panel and work it until it's smooth enough to use high build primers to get the real minor stuff out. When they paint it some, as I did back then, even "block" the paint with sand paper wrapped around paint sticks or "other tools". They apply more paint before they color sand and buff. That's how they get those mirror finishes on the real expensive collector cars along with the perfectly straight panels where you look down the sides and can't see a wave or a ripple anywhere. Yep, a $120,000 '59 Cadillac Coupe DeVille convertible will have dough all over it and you'll never know if it was done right. The same for a $1,000,000 Deusenberg unless it was restored to the actual condition it was in from the factory which many collectors/purists want. '63 to 67 'Vette's had doors that set about 1/4" higher than the roof when the doors were closed on the hardtops. They had "bond seams" on the quarter panels that could be seen as well as on the front fenders. You see one of those where that's not the case? The doors and bond seems were "doughed over" when the restoration was done. I got rid of the bond seems on every collector 'Vette I ever painted. The door fitting I never touched.

All that being said, the only way to repair that dent "the right way" is to get a new bedside, have it welded in by a good body and frame guy, or girl (I've seen a few smokin' hot girl welders over the years and they are real good at it. It's a shame there aren't more of them), and have a real good painter paint it to match as far as color and texture on the adjoining panels are concerned.. These new cars have such thin, tinny sheet metal on them that pulling out the dent and then getting the lines and the shape of the panel right with bondo is just too much labor. Welding on a new bed side is the way to go and your $1500 estimate is probably a little low for that and going the "pull the dent out and "Bondo" route will probably result in an inferior repair depending on how picky you are and how much you love your Taco. Especially since the real artists, like I was back in the day, have either left the industry or are now dead. Unless you go to a real custom shop that charges the real big bucks because they actually still have real artists that can do the job right. I'd get a few more estimates from shops that are "known" to do very high quality work and then decide how much you love your truck.

Back when cars were made out of real steel (think the 40's and 50's) there were "artists" who could actually "metal finish" a dent out and then just use primer and then paint it and it would look fine. That's because the metal the cars were made out of back then was thick enough to do it. It also required many specialized tools such as files, body hammers, torches etc., etc. to fix a dent without Bondo. Those days are gone and the people that did that are all dead. I managed only Once to fix a very small dent without using dough with the body hammers, heat, ice etc., etc. It really can't be done on these new cars anymore. I generally ended up using a little dough after metal finishing it close.

High quality paint and body work is anything but cheap these days. If anyone really loves their vehicle I'd get many estimates and be "very" wary of the cheap ones.

 

^^ That pretty well sez it...

 

I agree that bondo has its place for finishing but slathering it on a 1.5" deep dent that big is asking for problems later on.

 

You are absolutely right. However, I did it on two of my own personal cars and it held up just fine. Once again though, you are right. Too much dough applied over a surface that hasn't been prepped properly "will" result in problems down the road. You have to think of "dough" as just a really thick primer. Not really a serious filler for inch deep dents and definitely not for covering up rust holes which is why these days they just weld in an entire new panel because the steel is so thin and wimpy there is no way to really "work" it to get it close enough for "dough" in a reliable thickness. It's still being done at shops all over the country though where people simply can't afford to have the job done right.

I painted a '68 or close to that vintage Firebird convertible one time and once I stripped the car to bare metal I found a good 2 inches of bondo on the rear panel where the tail lights were. It was amazing! With all those curves and indentations curves and indentations back there even I couldn't tell there was that much dough. Who knows how long it had been on there and whoever did that job was a master "sculpter". He was good but so was I. I just stripped all the paint and re-did what he did. Fixing it properly would have been cost prohibitive to the customer who was a "wave" in our Navy. That car had been hit hard in the ass end and who knows how much dough was really on it and how much damage there was underneath it. She knew about all the dough and then brought us a second Firebird to do but we had closed down the shop by that time due to the crappy economy in VA. Everything seemed to go tit's up" in the state back then.

We had a VERY expensive collector Jag in the shop as well. The same damn thing. I strip it and find miles of dough. Thick dough. Nothing to do but smooth it out all over again and paint it. I forget what model and year it was but it was a VERY pricey car. Probably around $100,000 and that was back in the early 90's. I talked to a guy one time that had worked at a Caddy dealership back in the 70's. A Caddy came in one day with a dent in the qtr panel. He went to work on it and when he leaned into the sander he ended up elbow deep in the trunk. Some shop in the past had "repaired" a huge dent in the same qtr pnl by cutting out the dent backing it with cardboard and then bondoing over the carboard.

These shops nowadays, for the most part are held to a MUCH higher standard than what went on 40 years ago or even 20 years ago but there are still the butchers out there. Anyone who wants to go out and buy a used vehicle, especially a really expensive collector car needs to take a "mil gauge" with them as well as a magnet. Then you can go around the vehicle and see just how thick the coatings are under the paint. If you see above 10 or 20 mils there is something under there you probably don't want to pay for.

 

Poke holes and pull via a screw or stud pull, bondo, primer (2k is better) and color match / clear. I think you may surprise yourself how well you could repair this if you YouTube it! All the tools and materials wouldn't add up to 2/3 of $1500 (that's with buying decent stuff) and you could sell them after (if you buy a compressor and gun) to recoup even more. The best part is you will learn something new. Still the best fix imo would to remove it, replace it, and paint it yourself.

 

Try to track down the little brunette to help. I'm sure she has a competitive hourly rate.

 

NO GODDAMMIT, GO FIND A PDR PERSONNEL TO PULL THE DENT!!

 

but it's going to have to be painted...

 

unless you fill the holes before bonding water will get in from the back and cause the bondo to fail over time