With severe weather season in full swing, hail can be a damaging part of strong storms. A.S Dent Shop in Lubbock specializes in paintless dent repair and is ready for the busy months ahead.

“If it’s hail damage, we’ll fix it,” says owner, Allen Scott. “90% of the time we get hail in May and June, so the next two months are the biggest chance for hail. It’s just going to get busier as time goes on. For me, this is the preseason before our hail season.”

Scott says hail damage is mainly what he specializes in, but he can do any type of work regarding vehicle dents.

“I’m repairing their cars without having to have panels replaced or repainted. I take dents out of vehicles to make a living, but I’m really here to serve people,” he says.

After being in the business for 25 years, he’s pretty much seen it all.

“Hail is kind of like having a wreck on your car. You have a little scrape, fender bender, or you have a major hit. Everybody thinks of it coming down straight, but you get the wind that goes with it, and a lot of the time you’ll have a tremendous amount of side damage from 70 to 80 mile per hour winds,” he says. 

The amount of damage all depends on the size of the hail, and Scott says it can range from mild to severe.

“Pea size when it’s soft won’t dent cars, especially when it’s soft. If it gets to nickel size or bigger and starts getting hard, it will dent cars, he says.

Scott considers paintless dent repair an art and it can take him anywhere from half a day to three days to fix just one car. 

“Generally speaking, we go underneath the panel and we massage the dent back out. With dents, the deeper the dent is, the more memory is in the metal. That memory has to be worked out to make it flat and to get rid of the dent,” Scott says.

He fixes each dent one at a time, and says there is a huge difference between 10 and 200 dents. In order to see the dents better on the cars in his shop, he uses bright lights to see their reflections.

“If it’s a light colored vehicle, you need to pull it in the shade and get some reflection on it to be able to see the dents. Black vehicles show everything,” he says.

His recommendation for the rest of severe weather season is to keep your car covered during all hail events. He says people often try to strap protective items to their car as another way to prevent hail damage, but Scott says a lot of the time the straps will actually do more harm than the hail. 

“If you have a nice, new car and you have full coverage, make sure your comprehensive deductible is low. Generally speaking, a $250 deductible is a good deductible to have in West Texas. In other areas, it can be higher, but because of the weather here and the unpredictability, it doesn’t make sense to have a high deductible,” Scott says.