Bodyshop work issue.....

[efiste2]

Last year I had small dent repaired in my 2014 Focus ST O/S door. I took it to the local chap who has always done excellent work of a high standard for me, and the repair was perfect. Six months later however I have just noticed that you can see the outline of the dent appearing. it had bent into the door and been pushed against something inside the door itself, so it wasnt a paintless repair.
As I say this guy is known as the best in the area, so I am going to drop in and ask him what he thinks, but before I do can I ask you skilled chaps what do you reckon has happend and is this expected of this type of repair, or should it not happen.

the picture doesnt do the lower dent any justice, its not just a chip, it was pushed into something inside the door....

Attachment Deleted

[Deleted]

Very interesting what you say about body repairs and maybe questioning how they do the repairs!

Some years back I had some dents removed/repaired in a Transit and some time later I noticed the dent had reappeared! 

I'm no body man but I suspected on the Transit that the body repairer filled the dent with something which later fell out, kind of like having a filling in the tooth only to find the filling falls out and the dentist says you'll have to pay again!

[eddypeck]

Hard to see because of 'shiny' but looks like the dent effected the crease line in the car.

My understanding is a lot of the dent repair these days is gentle heat and manipulation of the panel. Without a hard panel beating, maybe 'after a cold winter' the metal 'remembers' the forced shape and starts to retract? From my time at bodywork school you can beat a panel quite a bit to manipulate it, shrink and stretch etc. I think some of these modern 'gentle' techniques don't actually 'reset' the metal ... if you get what I mean.

Just theory. 



Modern metal is mostly recycled too so the composite and structure of the raw material is different and a lot thinner than the old days, plus various electro-treatments and glavanisation - I'm sure there's some science at work here.