Life Hacks – Using Boiling Water to Get Car Dents Out

No matter how careful we are, almost all of us are going to wind up with a dent in our car at some point. It can be from something as simple as the kids bouncing a soccer ball off the fender or it could be the obvious minor accident, but no matter the cause, there could be a simple fix. This method may not work on every dent, but it’s simple and cheap enough to try first before you resort to professional repair shops.

Basically, what you’re going to do is fill a medium sized pot of water, brought to a boil, then poured carefully  down the dented panel. Then, for flat panels, use a plunger to suction to the panel then give it a yank. If all goes well, the panel will pop out nice a flat. If it doesn’t work on the first try, don’t be afraid to give it a couple of extra pulls before throwing in the towel. For rounded sections, like the corners of the bumper cover seen in the video below, step one in the same. After pouring some scalding water down the panel, you’ll have to take a different approach to working the dent itself out.

The guy in this video crawls under the bumper and pushes it out from the inside, carefully and systematically mashing out the dent from the inside. You can see that the bumper dent doesn’t come out as well as the one in the fender, but it certainly looks a lot better than it did before he started. The thing about bumpers and other plastic body panels is that they stretch just enough when dented that they almost never go back to their previous shape. However, you can get them pretty close, and make them look a lot better.