Video reveals one clever way to fix a dent in your car
Whether you’ve been rear-ended or, you know, that tree just popped up out of nowhere, you’ve likely gotten a dent in your car before. It turns out that, instead of paying big bucks to get it repaired, there’s a clever trick to fix a car dent that you likely never knew about.
According to the Adam’s Life Hacks YouTube channel, one major ingredient will help you the next time you need to pop a dent in your car. Want to know what it is? Hot water.
Yep. According to this video, hot water is key in helping you achieve a car surface that’s practically as good as new.
For dents in the body of the car, he uses hot water and a plunger to do the trick. Getting indentations out of the bumper are a little more tricky. You have to use hot water to get the bumper malleable, and then use your arm to reach behind the dent and push it out. So this method definitely takes a bit of elbow grease.
Still, it looks easy enough, and since we couldn’t stop thinking, “where has this been all my life?” after watching, we did some research into whether this actually works as well as it appears to.
For starters, people in the comments section of this video on Facebook seem to understand the logic behind this method:
“Hot water is to soften the cars paint so it doesn’t crack and flake off. The plunger just creates an airlock and pulls the dent out,” one commenter wrote.
They went on to recommend this only for certain types of dents: “This technique only good for a few types of dents, defs not folds.”
Others noted that this could work especially well on the plastic parts of your car, i.e. the bumpers, which makes sense.
I’d imagine it also depends on the time of year, too. You’re not going to want to try this in the dead of winter on a cold, icy car, for example.
Another method people seem to recommend involves a hair dryer and compressed air. Once you’ve used the hair dryer to warm the indented area, use compressed air to make it pop back into place. This is also said to work on only certain types of dents, especially smaller ones on the fender and hood, according to this video’s description on YouTube:
Apparently, getting a dent out of your car is easier than you ever thought possible. Definitely try these at your own risk, but our preliminary research shows that a little hot water can indeed go a long way towards car repair. Who knew?