How mobile dent repair works, from estimate to finished panel

Pick whichever route suits your day. All three lead to the same thing: a clear plan for the repair before anyone touches the car.

• By phone. Call us and describe the damage: where it is on the car, roughly how big it is, and whether the paint is cracked, chipped or still intact. For many dings and bumper scuffs that is enough to talk through the options.
• From photos. Upload pictures through the form on our estimate page, or email them to help@socalmobiledentrepair.com with your city and the year, make and model. Photos let us see the shape of the dent and the condition of the paint.
• In person. If you would rather someone look at the panel with a light and a hand on it, we can see the car where it sits.

The phone line is for calls only. Pictures go through the form or by email.

Once the plan is agreed, we set a day and a place. Tell us where the car will be parked: a home driveway in Pasadena, a street in Long Beach, an office garage in Irvine or a lot near the beach in Huntington Beach all work. Mention anything we need to reach it, such as a gate code, a guest pass or the level of a parking structure.

We serve every city in Los Angeles County and Orange County, so the visit comes to where your car already spends its day. See the service areas page if you want to check your city.

Every visit starts with a look under the light to confirm what the photos or the call suggested. If the damage turns out different from what we expected, we tell you before we begin, not after.

1. Paintless dent removal. Steel rods reach behind the panel and push the metal back up a little at a time, or glue tabs pull it from the front where there is no way in behind. High spots are tapped down and the panel is checked against the reflected lines until they run straight.
2. Bumper repair. A plastic bumper cover can often be warmed and reshaped from behind. If its paint is broken, the area is sanded, filled where needed, primed and painted.
3. Paint work. Scratches, chips, clear coat failure and rust are cleaned up, refinished in the car's own color and topped with clear coat, then blended so the edge of the repair does not show.

Paintless repair is not the answer to every dent. It needs intact paint and metal that has not stretched, so cracked or chipped paint, stretched metal and some sharp creases or dents on an edge usually call for filler and paint instead. Not every bumper cover can be saved either: one that is torn through or badly cracked may be better replaced. The estimate is where we sort that out, so you know the plan before the day of the repair.

Read more on the paintless dent removal and bumper repair pages.

Every car leaves the factory with a paint code, a short string of letters and numbers printed on a label. On many cars the label sits in the driver's door jamb; on others it is under the hood, inside the trunk or listed in the owner's manual. We mix to that code rather than guessing by eye.

The same code can come out slightly lighter or darker from one car to the next, and years of Southern California sun shift it further. That is why a repair is blended into the paint around it instead of stopping in a hard line.