Taking Out the Dings
Jake Kelm is standing over a beautiful Mercedes sedan with a hammer in his hand.
Beside him lay a variety of other tools: picks, probes, mallets. The assortment could belong to an oversized dentist, or perhaps a vandal with surgical standards. But Kelm isn’t bent on destruction. He’s one of four repair specialists at Dent Kraft PDR, a Plymouth-based company that restores dented automobiles without requiring repainting.
“You can always tell when a car has been repainted,” says Dent Kraft owner Don Kavanagh, because it lacks the factory finish and doesn’t quite match the rest of the body. That mismatch lowers its resale value, on aesthetic grounds and also because a potential buyer may be suspicious that the car was repainted after being in a more serious accident.
Kavanagh and his assistants work primarily from the underside of a car door or hood. The size of a dent isn’t an issue: They’ll repair dents up to 18 inches wide—so-called “deer dings”—and difficult dents such as creases.
Many of Kavanagh’s customers own expensive automobiles—his workplace is full of Mercedes, BMWs, and other high-end cars. But clients with less expensive vehicles also are very particular about their wheels. “Maybe it’s the first new car they ever bought, and that’s important to them,” he says.
Kavanagh also gets business from Minnesota vintage car owners, as well as from vintage car resellers and owners who live elsewhere and pay a transportation and sourcing company to bring their vehicles to Dent Kraft. “There’s thicker metal on muscle cars, and usually they have 40 years’ worth of dents,” he says. That makes fixing them more expensive—somewhere between $4,000 and $10,000. “But these cars are usually worth a lot, [tens of] thousands of dollars,” Kavanagh adds.
Kavanagh began the company in 1991, after an eight-year stint at Minnetonka luxury-car dealer Sears Imported Autos, where he was a service writer—and, eventually, an independent contractor for dent removal. Kavanagh wanted to combine his metallurgy skills with his knowledge of automobiles to offer a hard-to-find service: paintless dent removal. “I saw a big need for this,” he says. Dent Kraft performs roughly 2,500 repairs every year, and generated about $450,000 in revenue last year.
“The discerning customer is all about perfection,” Kavanagh says. “People won’t even accept a little wiggle. I used to hate that with my old job, but now I love it. They can pick it apart and they won’t find anything wrong.”
