How to repair remove a dent on a Ferrari update Ferrari 355 Neil Greenhouse restoration

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:01]Welcome back. Another Ferrari um update.

[00:00:03]I say update, this is a major update because thankfully we're getting closer to get it painted. Now, with this car, if you if you've been watching my videos, you'll see that I've you know, I've done a lot of work to it. We welded the floors up and it started off as a a a little job where it went to have the cam bouts changed and then it turned into this massive job where we went to the bare metal. It the engines off being fixed by MDL supercars in Talford. there doing that part of it. We started doing the body work and then we found no end of problems, little bits and pieces.

[00:00:34]Nothing major, just niggly things, you know, parts that you can't buy. We had to make panels for the floor. Done all the fabrication work. That's all finished. Now, we moved on to the body work. As I said in a previous video, when this car came in, it looked really not like a Ferrari should look. It looked really sort of stodgy, you know, it didn't look good at all. It was ripply. It looked and I was really convinced that it had some serious accent damage under all the paint. But when we started taking the paint off, there were that many layers. There was sort of 30 layers of paint in some cases on this car. But we got all the paintwork off now and it's back to bare metal. And lovely. It's lovely now because you can look along it. You can see those lovely delicate lines that give that car its distinctive look. And you couldn't really see that before because it was just stalky. It was too much paint and it just looked like a plastic bucket, you know? like a might as well been a garden no it look didn't look right look like a kit car it looked like a copy of the real thing but now it's not a copy it's the real deal but anyway the paint's off we've got it looking really really good we're heading towards getting some primer on it and starting to get it painted but got it in bare metal there are some little dents on it nowhere near as bad as it looked originally because it was just the layers of paint over and over and over again why somebody painted 30 times in different places I I don't know. I I don't I don't I just don't understand that. But anyways, they made a paint that's on it. Just made it look ripply. Taken all the paint off. It's nice and straight. There are a few little dings. There's a dent in this back wing, which it could be from anything. Car park, you know, shopping trolley, whatever it was there. The thing is because it's now bare metal, you can't see it. If it was shiny, you could look along the car and you could see the dent and then you could address it accordingly. But because it's now bare metal, you can't really it doesn't give you any definition to see where the dent is. So this video is more how to and what I'm going to try and show you if you want to angled in there and watch me how I'm going to address sorting a dente. So if you're restoring your own car or you've got any interesting tool to see how this sort of thing is done, then please keep watching and I'll explain to you how I can address this with just a few simple tools. an aerosol cam, a rubbing down block, and a panel beat or a dolly. And then we can rectify a dent in a Ferrari, but it doesn't have to be a Ferrari. Could be any car. It's the same thing. So anyway, first things first, we got our panel. I would go, personally, I would go around this car a panel at a time. So we look at this rear quarter and we think, right, is there any dents in it? Well, we can't see any dents. So we use the force. We use our senses. And our senses are these hands.

[00:03:14]We know that looking at it not really going to help us much because we can't see any definition of the dent. You might just see if it was quite a big dent, but you know, it's not really a good way of doing it. So, get your hand and you run your hand over the panel.

[00:03:29]And when you run your hand over the panel, there's any dips or lows, you'll feel it. Now, there is a technique to that. First off, I would like to say you don't really use your eyes. You've got to, it's a bit like a certain film when you've got to use the force, you know, you don't look at what you're doing. You just let let your senses do the do the work. So, what I would do, I know I know there's a dent in this back when I can feel it. But then, if I was a novice, I probably wouldn't feel it. So, if I go over it slowly like that, a lot of people, and I've tried this with other people, you put your hand over slowly, they go, I can't feel anything there.

[00:04:05]And then I say to them, don't look at the panel, look away. So you look at something else, you know, get into daydream land looking at school window.

[00:04:12]You don't want to be in math class, you know, dream along and just run your hand over, but do it bit quicker and a bit quicker. And as you're doing that, you'll feel it. You'll feel it go the undilations. And I can feel it in there now. So when I'm going along that panel, I can feel that. So I need to really locate it a bit better. So I'll just feel it now. I'll go slower and I'll get and I'll narrow it down. And I can feel it about this area. So I know that there's something a dent either out or in in that area. So now what I'm going to do, I'm just going to get a bit of aerosol pan etch primer. So edge primer is good because this is what you would put on bare metal. It's got an acid in it which etches into the paint into the steel, sorry. And it etches into the steel and it's what you would put on if you were doing a bare metal repair on aluminium or steel. The other thing is I know other people use like engineers dye or blue or there's other things you can use, but I don't really like doing that.

[00:05:10]I I know that edge primer is made to go on bare metal and also it's going to get rubbed off anyway, but it's not going to contaminate it with anything else. I wouldn't want to put anything else on there and then get it all nice and then put your primer on and then it react. So I know this won't react. So what they eight or nine quid a tin. It's easy enough to use. got to use a mask because it's obviously got it's got you know acid in it makes it etched. So I just put my mask on and what we're going to do now I'm just going to put a dust coat on there. Not gallons of it just a little dust coat just to cover it.

[00:05:56]No balloon with an add obviously if you haven't got an aine you can just you know let the the wind it'll evaporate anyway quite quickly. So So now we've got our light light coat of edge prime on there and it's dry split away more or less. So I can still feel the dent but I can't see it. So, we get our rubbing down block. And what we're going to do now, we're just going to lightly go over it.

[00:06:35]And you can see it's taken off the primer.

[00:06:41]So, nothing's really staying on there as stuff.

[00:06:45]And we're doing it in an X fashion. So, we're not just going one way. We're sort of same as if we were rubbing body filler down. to her. So, we're going that way, that way, that way, and we're following the panel. And it's it's exactly the same process if we were rubbing body filler down. And lo and behold, if you can see that, you see where that primer has stayed in that dip. So, everywhere where it's shiny is level, and where that primer has stayed in there, we know that that's now a dent. So, it's going in. And that's what I can feel. So, that's roughly where I said it was. You can look away from it and what you can feel is that bit of an undulation there. So the next thing we know where that is. We get an appropriate panel bead hammer and a dolly and we'll put our dolly cuz what we're trying to do now is tap the stinker of this out very carefully. There's two ways of doing this. We can either push it from the other side and go around the outside of the dent or we can panel beat it from the the other side. So I'm just going to I know roughly where it is.

[00:07:50]We'll work out where it is about there.

[00:07:52]AND THEN [music] because our primer is still on there, we can just go back with our block.

[00:08:20]And lo and behold, the dent is gone. So now it's gone. There's a little little tiny bit there. I could just block that.

[00:08:34]There's a slight bit there. So I might put another bit of primer on there and do it again. Basically, just keep doing that till it's absolutely dead smooth.

[00:08:42]And when you put your your another coat of prime, it actually is a little tiny tiny bit of primer still left in there.

[00:08:48]So, it's a minuscule dent there. So, we just repeat that process until it's actually completely gone. And then what'll happen is when you run your hand over it, there'll be no dent there. It's gone completely. And we do that with every panel. Go around the car. Some dents obviously you won't be able to do that with in a very awkward position on a corner or something. You can't get to the back of it. But the the process is the same with everything. So when you go around it, wouldn't matter. Like I said, it doesn't have to be a Ferrari, could be your wheelbarrow, could be you, whatever car you've got. Morris stion, doesn't matter. It's the same principle.

[00:09:20]But the main thing is try and keep the panels original as possible and the minimal amount of body filler. If it does have to have body filler, I would use on this car metallized body filler, which is very, very hard and it doesn't sink back. So when the car's painted, it'll stay like metal. It's the closest thing you can get to metal without putting lead load. is what they used to use back in the day. So, I hope this little video has helped you to understand the process and as I carry on, I'll I'll try and give you some more tips. So, if it helps you, lovely job and until next time, go steady.