Dealing With Hail Damage

When we purchased our little vintage travel trailer, the one thing I noticed right away was how much hail damage she had.  That is actually how she got her name.  She has little dings and dots all over her. It wasn't until we got home that we actually seen how bad it really was. 

So I knew giving Dottie a paint job was high on the list of things to do and she definitely need some paint desperately, but this trailer needed a lot of work first. Not only does she have a lot of hail damage, but she also has quite a bit of peeling and chipping paint.

So the last couple of weeks we have been sanding, and sanding, and sanding some more.  We are still in the process of sanding, but we have been taking turns between working in the interior and exterior.  Although I love Dottie, I am a little less than pleased with how much hail damage she actually has. So I started research how to get hail damage out of aluminum siding.  Well as far as I can tell, there isn't any.

When I was doing my research, "removing hail damage with dry ice" came up a lot.  So I am like "why not?".  We decided to give it a try.  I did a search for the nearest place that sold dry ice, and we were on our way.  Well I was really skeptical, and for good reason.  It didn't work.  We also have a 1978 VW bus that has some dings on it to so we thought we would give it a try on it while we had the dry ice on hand.  It didn't work on that either.  Maybe we were doing it wrong, but I doubt it.  We tried several different methods and none seemed to work.

Disappointed that the dry ice didn't work, I set about looking for other ways to deal with the "hell" damage.  Replacing the skin is not an option for us.  A job of this nature is way beyond my husband's skill level, but he has been doing body work on cars (with sheet metal) for the last 20 years.  In my search for a way to fix these nasty little dings, I discovered a post on vintageshasta.proboards.com/ on dealing with filling holes in aluminum.  Although, a hole is not the same thing as a ding, this got my husband to thinking.  The suggestion made was to use JB Weld to fill the hole.

Now this might make some of you cringe just a little, but what my husband did was drill a tiny little hole using the smallest drill bit he had on hand.  After he made the hole inserted a  pick and used it to pull the dent out, turning it a 180 degrees. When he was finished with pulling the dent out (the best he could) he filled the hole with JB Weld. and then used some Bondo to smooth everything out.

 

There is no way that he will be able to get all of the dings out.  This is because some of the hail damage is in between some of the little crevices. As you can see from the above picture he is only concentrating on the dings that are on the larger flat pieces of the siding.