I am currently in the body repair business and $1700 sounds like a fair price for a quality repair. The right way to fix that is to replace the welded on bedside panel. It is held on by a combination of welding, adhesives and foams that are expensive to replace. The outer panel you see is connected to several panels that you dont and there is no access to the back of the panel. To restore the truck to the way it was before is probably 15-20 hours of labor for an experienced tech, $500+ in parts and several hundred dollars worth of materials. The repair will be invisible and will outlast the rest of the vehicle. Most reputable shops will offer a warranty that the repair will last for the life of the vehicle. There will be very little difference in the cost of this repair from shop to shop as there is a standard for how much time each repair will take and parts prices are all pretty much standard.
A legitimate body shop is trying to pay an experienced bodyman maybe $20 an hour to work in harsh conditions. He is trying to pay for a $100,000 frame straightening machine and computerized measuring system required by insurance companies. There's the $100,000 paint booth required by OSHA and EPA. He is using EPA mandated materials to paint the car that cost in the neighborhood of $20 per SF to use (A $30 can of house paint is about $1.50 per sf for two coats). and countless other specialized tools. Building a new bodyshop from scratch is proabably a $1million+ investment. In fairness, most of these requirements are for the safety of the workers and cars are built to much tighter tolerances than they once were.
The panel could be repaired and it would look good. It still requires expertise and expensive materials. Lack of access to the back of the panel means that you can't replace existing corrosion protection that will be removed in the accident and repair process. It is likely that after several years, maybe less, that the bedside will start rusting. The design of these bed sides lends itself to rusting anyway. The labor will be similar to the high quality repair as will materials but the parts cost will be taken out. Still an $800-1000 repair.
Billy Bob's Bondo Shack could drill some holes, pull it out, slap a little bondo on it. It might look
OK for a little while but it will probably start to fade and you will start seeing scratches. The color may not be quite right. It will probably start rusting in 6 months. Even this is probably a $400-800 repair.
idk, not a really bad dent, looks like an easy paintless repair, find a local guy that knows what he's doing and have him do a paintless repair, and get a fender gard off ebay or OEM parts store
I had some paintless dent removal done on my car, and he had stuff in his shop worse than that
Paintless Dent Repair (PDR in the biz) is for hail dings and shopping cart damage. It requires access to the back of the panel. Dents stretch the metal. It has to be shrunk to return to place. When you shrink the metal you end up with a micro washboard surface. The smaller the dent, the less the metal needs to shrink. The bigger the dent, the more chance you have of breaking the paint or being able to see the washboard (wavy surface). Once the paint is cracked it needs refinished. You may have seen worse dents in your PDR guy's shop, but I guarantee you he was repairing them the old fashoned way.
two things-
second, i would at least attempt to pop that out with my hand first. i'm an ex-body man and if you would have tried to pop that out right away it may have worked.
It doesn't really matter how long the metal is stretched for, all that matters is that its stretched. Five seconds or five years later the repair is the same. Think of a flat panel. before the accident you had ---- after the accident you get \/ where the dent is both hhigher and lower than the contour of the original panel. You need to make it something more like vvvv for repair and then fill in the low spots. You have to turn the stretched metal into an accordion, or use heat (torch) to shrink it. If all you do is pop the dent out then you just turn \/ into /\.
It sucks that you messed up your dad's truck but you did the right thing. If the shop charged for the insurance quality repair and did less then that is a problem. If he took it to a reputable place then they probably did the right repair.
The damage was behind the wheel well and probably a bigger dent than in your picture and require a decal which gm charges 40 bucks for. The dealer's body shop wanted 900 to fix it and the independent shop was 750. The repair required a repaint of a majority of one side of the bed. Oh yeah my truck is a 2009 Silverado, so it uses all that expensive new paint stuff.
