PDR tools are all types of tools that are used to accomplish the highly skilled art of Paintless Dent Repair. These tools come in all different shapes and sizes, from the thinnest of small hand-held wires, to the largest of fender and tailgate bars up to eight feet long and 3/4” in diameter.
Paintless Dent Repair, sometimes referred to as Paintless Dent Removal, is the process of removing or repairing dents and dings in the outer painted surface panels of a vehicle. As the name implies, paintless dent repair does not require the body panel to be repainted. This is accomplished by using the paintless dent repair tools to gently flex the sheet metal of the panel and slowly and gently massages the dented area back to its original position without disturbing the painted finish, thereby, paintless.
The many different shapes and styles of vehicles on the road today mean that a pdr technician must have an extensive set of tools to be able to properly perform paintless dent repair in a professional manner. These professional pdr tool sets can easily contain as many as fifty to one hundred uniquely different tools.
In the early days of Paintless Dent Repair technicians had to manufacture their own pdr tools from pieces of scrap metal or anything else that could be creatively shaped into the desired shape. Hand tools were usually made from old screwdrivers that had been ground down to allow for a good work surface and then bent to the desired shape, usually anywhere from 90 - 120 degrees. Other favorite items that were used to fashion pdr tools from were wire car antennas and even old CB antennas. These old antennas were great for making wire tools from because they were long and slim but were made out of very strong steel that would hold their shape under heavy use. Salvage deck lid springs were also a favorite of paintless dent repair technicians to make their intermediate length tools from. Finally a technician would have to make their bars from pieces of steel stock, often half inch stainless, which would have to be heated and bent to the desired angles as well as carefully ground at the tip to provide a good surface so they could be used to perform quality repairs.
Once the business of Paintless Dent Removal became a thriving industry, companies began to spring up around it supplying all kinds of supplies, lights and, yes, tools for the technicians so they could spend less time reshaping their homemade tools and more time actually doing the pdr repairs that made them money. These early “store bought” tools were really rather crude by today’s standards but at the time they were thought to be very nice. The fact was that, at the time, the industry was still young and the companies making these tools were almost all small start ups that didn’t have a lot of assets to sink into the risk of a new venture. These old tools were so crude, in fact, that the hand tools were actually just bare metal rods bent into usable shapes and then looped around to make a very basic tool handle. The early tools were also made out of mild steel that, although more durable and stronger than the old home-made pdr tools, had a tendency to bend or break. This mild steel with no surface treatment of any kind was also very bad about rusting when exposed to the least amount of moisture. It was not uncommon just a few years ago to see dent technicians sitting around at the first of the season using steel wool to buff the rust off of all of their tools from them being stored during the off season.
The evolution of the modern paintless dent repair tool set has brought us to the point now where the current tools are made from much higher quality materials than in the past. There are also now many more manufacturers of pdr tools and they are making many different variations of these tools which allow the technician to find tools that are made in such a manner and with such materials that fit exactly what the individual technician desires. As a matter of fact, there are a few companies that even allow the customer to actually custom order any tool they desire, made to their exact specifications.
In the old days a pdr technician would buy a set of tools from a company and, once they had finished their paintless dent repair training, they would go to work and just get use what they had. Now the pdr tool companies allow people to mix and match tools to create sets of only the exact tools they want. The technician can then build their set by getting a few tools from several different companies. This is great because almost every tool company has tools that they specialize in and others that aren’t that great. The smart technician today pieces his set together by only buying the best tools each company has to offer.
This same technique of assembling a set of pdr tools caries over to the larger fender tools and bars because there are some wide variances available when it comes to both materials and workmanship when it comes to the larger paintless dent removal tools. The technician can, and should, be careful when selecting the large tools to include in their set.
Unfortunately, the popularity of the paintless dent repair industry and the huge growth in the number of technicians shopping for tool sets have brought about many low quality pdr tool companies. A technician can actually find tool sets priced at, or even below, the cost of a single quality tool. These cheap pdr tool sets are, quite simply, junk. They are made of inferior quality materials and will end up costing a technician more in the long run than a good, quality set of pdr tools. If you make your living doing paintless dent repair, you absolutely have to have a set of professional, quality tools. Would you trust your truck to a mechanic who bought his shop tools at K-Mart? If you are going to be a professional pdr technician, you have to have professional pdr tools.
