Finish bay
Hail and paintless dent repair
Metal worked back from behind the panel where the paint is unbroken, refinished through the downdraft booth where it isn't. The right route is decided panel by panel, not guessed at for the whole car.
Chapter 01
What eastern Iowa hail actually does to a panel
Hail in Cedar Rapids does not hit every car the same way. It lands hardest on the horizontal panels, the roof, the hood and the deck lid, because those are the surfaces facing straight up when the storm comes through. What you find afterward is a field of small round dents, sometimes a dozen, sometimes a hundred, scattered across those panels while the vertical door skins and fenders usually come through with far less.
The dividing line that actually matters is not how many dents there are, it is whether the paint film over each one is still intact or whether it has broken or stretched. A dent with unbroken paint is a metal problem. A dent where the paint has cracked, chipped, or pulled thin enough to show white underneath is a metal problem and a finish problem, and those two situations get repaired differently.
Technician in full respirator gear refinishing a bumper in the downdraft booth
The two repair routes, and how we choose between them
Where the paint film is intact, we use paintless dent repair, working the metal back into shape from behind the panel with specialized tools and no refinishing at all. No filler, no primer, no new paint, because the factory finish was never actually broken. That keeps the panel on its original paint, which is worth protecting, and it is the faster, less invasive route whenever the dent qualifies for it.
Where the paint has broken or the dent is too sharp or too deep for the metal to be worked back cleanly, we move to conventional repair and refinish. That means the panel gets prepped on our Team Blowtherm UltraPrep prep station, sprayed with computerized paint mixing matched against the rest of the car as it sits today, and baked on in the downdraft booth for a hard, even, dust-free finish. If a panel is damaged beyond what straightening and refinishing can bring back, we replace it with factory replacement parts and adjust it into the rest of the body so the gaps run true.
We make that call panel by panel, not car by car. It is common for one storm to leave a hood that qualifies for paintless work sitting right next to a deck lid that needs a full refinish, and the estimate reflects that mix rather than treating the whole car as one decision.
Chapter 03
Why it is worth addressing, and what the warranty covers
A dent with broken paint left alone through an Iowa winter is where corrosion starts. Road salt and moisture get into the exposed metal at the crack, and what began as a cosmetic dent can turn into a rust spot under the paint within a season or two. Paintless dent repair sidesteps that entirely, since the factory seal over the metal is never broken in the first place, which is part of why it is the preferred route whenever a dent qualifies.
Whichever route a panel needs, the work carries a lifetime warranty on the craftsmanship of the bodywork, the same warranty every job at Andrews Collision Center carries, not a shorter hail-specific term. If a storm has left your roof, hood or deck lid marked up, call (319) 365-4627 and we will look at each panel and tell you honestly which ones qualify for paintless work and which ones need to go through the booth.
Andrews Collision is rated 4.5 out of 5 from 145 Google reviews, and every panel repaired here carries a lifetime warranty on the craftsmanship of the bodywork.