Summer means sunshine, hot weather, days at the beach and fun vacations. It’s also prime time for thunderstorms, which can wreak havoc on your car or truck, especially if there’s hail involved. Whether it’s small, dime-sized hail, golf ball sized hail or something resembling a grapefruit, it’s going to cause some damage. If your vehicle has been pummeled, and has even a small amount of hail damage, you’re going to want to get it repaired fast for three very distinct reasons.
Protect The Paint Job
When hail hits the surface of your vehicle, it causes dimples and dents to form. What’s going to happen, over time, is that the paint is going to crack and chip away in those spots. Once that happens, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the surface follows suit. Before long, you’re going to have large spots of chipping, cracked paint that make your car or truck look like it’s been neglected and abused. Repairing the hail damage quickly will assure that those spots don’t spread, protecting the rest of your vehicle from further damage. Let those spots go too long and you’ll have to get the entire vehicle re-painted at some point in the future.
Keep The Rust Out
Cracking, peeling paint from hail damage exposes the bare metal of your vehicle’s body to the elements. When water starts to seep in and accumulate under the paint, chemical reactions cause rust to start forming. At first, it will only be surface rust, which doesn’t seem like a huge problem. However, given enough time, that rust will start to eat right through the metal, creating holes and weak spots. That rust isn’t just unsightly, it makes your car’s body unstable and reduces its useful life by years. Repairing that hail damage sooner, rather than later, will keep the rust from reducing your car into a rust bucket you are ashamed to drive.
Your car is an investment, one that you hope to cash in on at some point. If you’re like most people, you probably plan on upgrading your vehicle to a newer model within a few years. That usually means trading in the one you currently own, or selling it outright and taking the cash to the dealership. The truth is, it’s going to be really tough to convince someone to give you top dollar for a dented, dinged, rusted vehicle. That’s why you’ve taken such good care of it up until that hail storm decided to ruin the surface. If you get the hail damage fixed, you won’t see the value of your car degrade as quickly as if you leave it for a later date.
Hail storms are a fact of life and you can’t really avoid them. The only thing that you can really do is to deal with the damage that is caused when one bears down on you. If your car has hail damage, don’t wait, contact us right away so we can get to work. With more than three decades of experience in auto body repair, we have seen it all and we know exactly what to do to repair even the worst dents caused by hail.