He’s probably the only person who rubs his hands together in anticipation when weather forecasts call for hail. But then, Rod Harrison of Devlin has an uncanny passion for repairing automobile dents.
“Hail damage repair has been my bread and butter for the past few years,” he noted.
Harrison suffered what, at first, appeared to be a stroke of bad luck when he purchased a dealership, including a number of used cars. Shortly afterwards, a hail storm unleashed ice the size of golf balls (and bigger) on Fort Frances and covered many of his vehicles with large dents.
“In the deal, I had all these used cars left over and now I couldn’t sell them,” recalled Harrison.
So when a U.S. hail team arrived in International Falls, Mn. to take on damaged vehicles, Harrison offered to work alongside one of them in Fort Frances–and he’s been repairing dents ever since.
“I just started helping. Each vehicle would have maybe 500-1,000 dents so after doing maybe 20 to 30 vehicles and maybe 20,000 dents, I started feeling like, hey, I’m getting the hang of this,” he noted.
Now Harrison has his own Fort Frances business, The Dent Clinic, where he has been repairing local vehicles–literally dent by dent.
“It’s pretty close to the dental clinic so I get some calls. [I answer] ‘No lady, I can’t fix your dentures,’” he quipped.
Harrison handles each dent one at a time and with special tools, he carefully applies pressure to the inside of the dent, working by fractions of millimeters to get it just right.
“When I started, I could not fix it. It’s an amazing process, you work from behind and massage out,” he explained.
Paint on most vehicles today has become so high-quality that even after being hit by huge hail stones, it job can remain unaffected. All Harrison has to do is ease the dent back out and it remains unnoticeable.
“It always stays on, it never seems to come off,” he noted. “You very carefully work up the dent until you can’t see it any more. People assume that the metal would be stretched but it really isn’t.”
Harrison has since become a recognizable part of a subculture of “dent men.” He has worked in areas hit by hail storms in Manitoba, and recently joined a crew of 17 dent men from a number of areas who were sub-contracted to travel to Quebec after a major hail storm there.
The crew repaired more than 100 heavily-damaged cars in a number of weeks.
“You have to have an extreme amount of patience to do the work, sometimes it’s even difficult to hold a conversation at the same time,” Harrison said. “You have to focus because perfection is what you’re seeking.”
As a result of his new career, Harrison and his family also have developed a fascination for hail–and have a small collection of hail stones from a couple of different storms sitting in their freezer.
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
