To Hail And Back: Repairing Your Car After A Severe Storm

Precipitation plays a key role in the sustaining of all life on earth. Unfortunately, some types of precipitation can wreak havoc on your property. If you live in an area where severe hailstorms occur on a regular basis, you need to be prepared to address hail damage to the body of your car. 

Facts About Hailstones

To appreciate the amount of damage that a hailstone can cause when it collides with your car, it can be helpful to understand what hailstones are and how they form. Some thunderstorms are made up of clouds that contain supercooled droplets of water.

As these droplets of water come into contact with a particle of dust, ice crystal, or other nuclei material, a spherical shape begins to form. The updraft of the thunderstorm continues to push the hailstone to the top of the cloud, where it collides with more water droplets and grows in size. The more powerful the thunderstorm, the more the hailstones produced by the storm will weigh.

The largest hailstone on record weighed in at more than a pound and a half, but typical hailstones are the size of a pea or marble. Smaller hailstones can still cause a significant amount of damage, depending on the velocity with which they hit your car. 

Dents

The most common type of body damage sustained by cars during a hailstorm is dents. These dents occur in the hood, roof, and trunk of a car, since these are the surfaces exposed to the storm. Doors and side panels usually remain undamaged.

Unlike a minor accident that might produce a single dent, hailstorms produce many dents in a vehicle's exterior. If you don't have the dents removed, the damaged areas could become vulnerable to rust. A reputable auto body repair services shop should be able to use a paintless dent repair technique to remove any depressions from your car's hood, roof, or trunk.

Paintless dent repair can be completed quickly and it does not require a body shop to try and match the paint color applied to a repaired area with the factory paint color of your car; his results in a more seamless repair that will restore your vehicle to its original condition.

Don't let a hailstorm compromise the structural stability and aesthetic beauty of your vehicle. Invest in paintless dent repair if a severe hailstorm leaves your vehicle's exterior surfaces peppered with visible indentations in the future.

Share