Generally speaking, unless you live in Oklahoma that is, filing an insurance claim for hail damage on your vehicle is a rare thing. A person may only experience it once or twice in their lifetime or not at all if they live in a region where damaging hail doesn’t fall. It can be a traumatic experience, especially if you had to wait out the storm inside your car with the deafening sound of hundreds of hail stones mercilessly pelting your vehicle.
After the storm clears and the sun comes out, you examine the damage. You may find hundreds of small dents covering your hood, trunk lid, side panels and yes even the roof of your car. You may be told that the best repair option is to replace the roof panel. Upon hearing this, you, as the owner of the car and wanting to be fully informed of your options may ask the repair facility how exactly the roof panel is replaced. The repair estimator in response may look at you and nonchalantly reply “oh, we cut it off and put a new one on”.
“You’re gonna do what??” You envision emergency personnel wielding hydraulic powered “Jaws of Life” snapping pillars, breaking glass and crushing braces as your car is opened up like a can of tomato soup. You think “how can this person sit there and calmly tell me they are planning to massacre my car?” Well, he or she can talk about it so calmly because its actually not as big of a deal as your imagination may make it out to be. A reputable shop with modern equipment training and know-how, that adheres to the manufacturers’ procedures for replacement, can confidently stand behind a repair, even a repair as dramatic as replacing the roof panel on an automobile.
Is it the best option? That depends. If the hail damage is too severe, either in number or in the size of dents to use Paintless Dent Removal (PDR), then yes in my opinion replacement is the best option. However the best and least intrusive method to repair a hail damaged roof is PDR. The structural integrity of the vehicle is not modified, the factory finish remains intact, and the only cutting that will be done is cutting the time it takes to restore your car to it’s pre-incident condition.
Are there other options? Yes there are. If a roof panel can otherwise be repaired with PDR but the paint was damaged by a hailstone hitting near the edge of the panel or one or two areas on the roof require conventional body work because of a dent that stretched the metal, a procedure known as “Push to Paint” can be implemented. Simply put “Push to Paint” is the process where PDR is performed then the areas that need conventional repair are addressed and the panel is then refinished. In my opinion this is a better solution than replacing the panel for the reasons stated above (its less intrusive and it generally takes less time). The original panel remains intact and the repair includes very little body filler.
However, if the panel is so damaged that it should be replaced and a body shop wants to use body filler to repair it for whatever reason (perhaps they are not set up to properly replace a roof) in my opinion, a shop that uses a large amount of body filler (like in this photo) to repair a badly damaged roof is doing the customer a disservice. The potential for the filler to crack out or the paint to peel is high, especially here in our climate of temperature extremes.
If you find yourself in need of hail repair and would like an honest assessment and recommendation on how to proceed come see us here at the shop. The address is 41 Bisbee Ct. unit B3, Santa Fe NM 87508.
