Steaming Out a Small Dent or Ding

by: Jeff Miller

with permission

After you have done all your final sanding before you start dying, painting or clear coating and you look over the guitar one final time and you see this 1/64” deep ding on the front of the guitar. Don’t panic and think you have to spend another 40 minutes level sanding again. Jeff has detailed how to make a minor repair in under five minutes to make you breathe a little easier.

Visit Jeff on his site at GuitaristJeffMiller.com

Above is the dent. It doesn't look very bad in the pic, but it's pretty deep and would take a lot of sanding to get it all out. I'd probably end up with an uneven surface too. If the dent is 1/64" or so, I steam them out.

Wet a paper towel with some water and dab on the dented area.

Now get a standard clothes iron that has steam. The wife hasn't used our iron in years so I figured I might as well get our money's worth out of it. I place the iron on the dented area for a few seconds with the steam on. It doesn't take long, just a few seconds.

The dent is gone. Now, just hit it lightly with some sandpaper to flatten the raised grain and you're done. It took me less than a minute to fix that dent. That saved a lot of sanding!