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Types of Car Damage: Dings, Dents & Other Definitions |
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Car damage can range in severity from minor fender benders to wholesale demolition. Believe us, we’ve seen it all. Modern cars are designed to protect their passengers so most accidents will leave you with the potential for repair. Attachment to a vehicle for its sentimental or practical value is something we understand well, so in this article we’ll briefly go over the types of body damage and what they can mean for your car.
Dings
Dings, as the somewhat whimsical word suggests, are small indents in the surface of your car. They can result from slight impacts, rocks, hail, any kind of minimal pressure. Dings are much easier to fix than dents, being shallow and usually without accompanying paint damage.
Dents
The word "dent" can encompass several kinds of impacts but they will always be more severe than a ding. They can be as shallow as dings but stretch over a much larger area. More often they are deeper, causing cracks in your paint as the metal creases from a sharper impact.
Dents are trickier (and usually costlier) to fix because they can weaken the structure of your car. A serious dent is referred to as a “kink” by I-Car, which defines the term as a “sharp bend with a small radius, usually more than 90 degrees over a short distance...a permanent area of deformation that will not return to its pre-accident shape without the use of excessive heat.” Applying heat to high grade steel will weaken it (there is also the matter of being able to safely reach a kinked section of the body) and it is for this reason that kinks usually require replacement parts.
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