Buy It And Try It: The Ding King

It's inevitable. You park your car and somebody will always park next to you. And if you're like us and you've doubled the population of your building, the parking decreases, and the dings and dents increase. So we picked a dutifully dented SUV from our parking lot and headed to the professionals at Hayes Brothers Body shop in Sacramento. We brought the Ding King with us to see how well it really works.

It claims to save you hundreds of dollars and saves you the hassle of dealing with auto body repair shops.

But eighty percent is better than nothing, especially since Randy Jones, the shop manager, says it would cost about $800 to fix this perfectly.

That's a lot more than our $25 Ding King that says you can do it yourself in a half hour. The box says it will take out dents or dings, but only if there's no edge or point.

So we empty out the box of tools, and read the single page of instructions. Step one: clean the area with the "special" solution.

That's for the glue gun. A sort of scrap booking looking-thing with some jet black glue sticks.

The instructions said this thing is meant only for dents no bigger than a grapefruit, so we move forward as instructed. Apply glue, put in the center of our damaged area . and wait 60 seconds.

And then it's got to cool for five minutes. Place on the dent-pulling wing nut and simply twist it until it pops.

We gotta listen for it to pop and the Ding King comes off. The glue just stays there. So we scrape and scrub, and the ding remains. Back to the instructions, which say that Some dents may require up to 10 pulls to achieve desired results. That means you'd have to glue it on 10 times, pull it 10 times until you're happy with it. So we try it again, gluing, and waiting.

This time we had to scrape the glue off of the car, and clean it with solution. But even from a distance the ding's still there. It doesn't look perfect or brand-new looking.

OK, one more try to see if we can get the glue gun to work. but no magic results, just a lot of glue, and a few scratches. So the professional opinion? The Ding King may have been dethroned.