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Pops-a-Dent
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Vendor Commercial
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ASOTVI Review
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March 24, 2008
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| | | ASOTVI RATING: DOESN'T WORK AS ADVERTISED |
What is it? Do-it-yourself dent and ding repair kit for your car
Major Claims
- Box says, “It really works!” – We could not verify this claim, even with multiple attempts
- “So easy anyone can do it” – We couldn’t get it to work
- Works on any size car and just about any size dent – Absolutely untrue due to the physical design and limitations of the product.
This product consists of several pieces as part of a kit: An electric glue gun, two glue sticks, three different sized glue pads with stem (puller), pulling bridge, knob, and a knockdown tool (for tapping down dents that are pulled out too far, as stated in the instructions).
Per the vendor commercial, the printed claims on the product’s box, and the product’s included instructions, the way this kit is supposed to work is that you first begin by plugging in the electric glue gun and waiting five minutes for it to warm up. When the glue is ready, you apply a generous portion to the glue pad of one of the pullers. The glue pad is then attached to the center of the dent. The instruction say to wait 3 to 5 minutes for the glue to dry, but not to wait more than 8 minutes. From that point the bridge is laced onto the threaded stem of the glue pad, with its two pads positioned on either side of the dent. By rotating the knob onto the stem, the bridge provides a counterforce, “pulling” the dent out and restoring the sheet metal to its original condition. That’s how it’s supposed to work “in theory.”
As our video illustrates, we attempted to get the product to work multiple times but with no success.
To begin with, the design of the product limits its potential effectiveness fairly dramatically:
- The dent you wish to repair can’t be more than approximately 5 inches wide, in terms of total surface area, due to the fact that the pads of the bridge have to span it and be resting on the high points of the original surface, where you would like to pull out the dent to match.
- If the metal has been stretched in any way when it was damaged, this product will do nothing to reform it back to its original shape.
- If a dent is on a corner or rounded surface such that the two pads of the bridge can’t straddle either side of it, the product isn’t applicable.
- It isn’t applicable to bumpers or anywhere on the car you aren’t dealing with light sheet metal.
- Glue drying time is nothing short of pure guesswork. The whole concept of this product is that the application of glue to the dented surface is going to be exactly strong enough to hold fast sufficient to pull out the dent, but still be pliable enough to remove with a snap and without becoming permanently glued to the car. There’s nothing other than trial and error available for this to be achieved, if it can be achieved.
The weakest aspect of this product is the glue process. It is conceivable that on a relatively small dent, which is merely an indentation in fairly light sheet metal, that someone might accidentally wait the exact amount of time needed to apply sufficient force to pop out just such a dent, and also come away from the metal before the glue has had time to dry so much that it bonds to the metal and can’t be easily removed.
So we aren’t prepared to claim that this product could never possibly work in any instance. We are simply observing based upon our evaluation that the possibility of achieving a successful result with this product, best case, is very limited in scope of applicability, is not as easy as the vendor claims, and it cannot physically be done on any and all types of dents or on any and all cars as the vendor claims.
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Product: Pops-a-Dent
Available From: Simoniz
Summary:
- Even after multiple attempts, no dents were repaired
- Timing the glue drying is anyone's guess and there is a risk of it becoming stuck to the car
- Due to the product's construction, it can only span dents no more than 5" in width
$14.95 + S&H
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