PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Keith Cosentino: I’m Keith Cosentino. He’s Shane Jacks and this is the PDR College Podcast where we are coming at you every week with news, skills and knowledge you can put into your hollow mind to shape the rest of your PDR career into the shape of greatness which looks like a giant gummy bear to some of you but to me it looks like giant, giant stacks of –
Shane Jacks: Groovy.
Keith Cosentino: Stacks of what, Shane?
Shane Jacks: Stacks of gold coins falling out of the sky. All this hail falling, man. We got to go get it.
Keith Cosentino: There’s a lot of it right now, isn’t there?
Shane Jacks: Yes, there is.
Keith Cosentino: Man, I don’t get it here in Cally. We get shopping cart hail or I run into my garage door hail. My daughter turned into something. Everybody blames their daughters. Nobody blames their sons. I don’t know why.
Shane Jacks: Which is the exact opposite of what is actually true most likely.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, most likely. Well, maybe that was true before Facebook and Twitter when girls were paying attention when they were driving but now they are glued to the device.
Shane Jacks: True that.
Keith Cosentino: So before we get started today I want to remind everybody about ReconPro. That’s automobiletechnologies.com and that is the company that makes the software that I run my entire business on, save for the accounting. I use QuickBooks.
But for the day to day operations I am running ReconPro and what that means is that me and all my technicians have IPhones and within the IPhone there’s some software and this is what you use to estimate a car, to write an estimate if somebody wants it and e-mail it to them and most importantly to make an invoice. Make the invoice right there on the phone. It uses the process of magic and goes to a computer in a cloud and then zaps back into your home computer and everything is transmitted in real time. So you can make an invoice, throw the IPhone into the ocean and you’ve lost no information. Fantastic.
No paperwork exchanged between my technicians and my home office. Everything happens with electronics and those guys are able to keep on pushing and pushing and pushing steel and we don’t have to push paperwork around. It’s fantastic.
In fact, I think about sometimes how I used to hand paper invoices to people and thought that was just fine and then I think when I do business somewhere and someone hands me back a handwritten paper invoice, what is my impression of this company? Provided I’m not at a flea market it is a terrible impression. It’s like wow, you’re gonna write that by hand, huh? Okay. Got the tax right?
Shane Jacks: Yeah.
Keith Cosentino: So it’s automobiletechnologies.com if you want to check those guys out. Changed my service business for the better and there’s even more paperwork happening on the hail side –
Shane Jacks: Yes.
Keith Cosentino: With the exchange of estimates and supplements and when you’ve got everything coming straight to and from the phone, man, and you can save five minutes or an hour on a car waiting for something to come and go or to – imagine you’re on paper to fax something or scan and e-mail it. Forget it. This is where it’s supposed to be. This is how a business should run. So check them out if you’re interested in that.
Shane Jacks: How much time does that save you, Keith, per week?
Keith Cosentino: Oh my gosh. I mean honestly we’ve gone into in detail before but think about this. At the end of every month, and we waited ‘til the end of the month which is kind of bad business but it took up so much time we just decided to wait and do it all at once at the end of the month my techs would have to gather up all their invoices, make sure they’re in order and get them somehow to me or to my office so that my wife could process all the paperwork.
So then she’d have three technicians worth of invoices for a month stacked up in paper and she’d have to enter all those in. So forget about her work, which is down by 90 percent. But all these stacks that these guys had to put together and bring me, every minute they spend stacking up paper and driving it around they’re not producing money for themselves or for the company.
Shane Jacks: Right.
Keith Cosentino: It’s total time suck and they hated doing it. We hated doing it and think about this. They lose that stack of paperwork, the truck gets stolen, you know, they knock it over in a big old bowl of ice cream that they’re eating, it’s over with. I mean, how do you remember the cars you did three weeks ago.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. This sounds terrible. When I was doing paper invoices I had a blowout of the truck, you know.
Keith Cosentino: It’s real. It’s stupid.
Shane Jacks: Where I do come out with the dollar bills that are on the floor, you know, that were in my way.
Keith Cosentino: Just vacuum them.
Shane Jacks: Sometimes the ones and the tens and the fives on the floorboard of the truck get in the way and you kick them out. They get stuck in the gas pedal and –
Keith Cosentino: Here’s my embarrassing story.
Shane Jacks: And the invoices go out with it.
Keith Cosentino: We used to use the books, like just the off-the-shelf invoice books you get from Staples or whatever.
Shane Jacks: You didn’t write your name at the top did you?
Keith Cosentino: No, we had a stamp. Here’s the reason. Well, here’s the reason. If you ever ran out you were five minutes away from getting a new book, right? Just go to Staples.
And that’s embarrassing enough. But think about this. Once in a while I would forget or inadvertently skip a page and not tear an invoice out of the book and just never bill somebody a few hundred bucks because I didn’t get a paper invoice out of the book. Like two months later I’d be looking for an invoice and go, oh, man I never billed these guys 400 bucks because I forgot to tear a piece of paper of the book. So stupid.
So that’s what we did because that’s what we did. But man, there’s a better way.
Today you are going to share some knowledge with us that most of us don’t have.
Shane Jacks: Wow, what is that? Is it about women or?
Keith Cosentino: That was 20 years ago for you Jackson.
Shane Jacks: True that.
Keith Cosentino: Your knowledge about women now is like how to speak to teenage girls about difficult social issues.
Shane Jacks: That was 20 years and around 40,000 hair follicles earlier.
Keith Cosentino: Tell us about this magic blending hammer.
Shane Jacks: Do you want me to tell you about the hammer or the process of blending. Which one you want?
Keith Cosentino: Which one’s more important?
Shane Jacks: Equally important. Equally important.
[Crosstalk]
Keith Cosentino: I will say with the knowledge that I have the process is more important than the hammer.
Shane Jacks: Yes, yes. The process of blending. What do you want to know? Do you want me to take you start to finish?
Keith Cosentino: Well, here’s some stuff that I hear people say. Here’s some stuff that I had in my mind before you were able to show me in person and, you know, obviously you and I are pals so we spent hours and hours talking about this that a lot of guys would have loved to have these conversations with you.
But before I knew anything about it – before I knew anything from you about it, just what I heard and what I thought – I thought, okay, if you – when you’re done doing this – first of all there’s – it’s some kind of a misnomer to call it blending all the time because what really – in my opinion, what you do is you do all your surface work or, you know, all to speak of all of it – with a hammer where most guys are using a knockdown in a hammer. So that’s how you work the surface of the metal. End of story.
But everybody calls that blending and when you say blending they’re assuming what you’re talking about is I’m going to take a small dent and make it disappear with a hammer. So that’s what I thought it was completely whenever the hammer was in the box or the pocket until you needed to make a small dent go away and then you got it out.
So that’s what we were talking about when we were talking about blending and you said, “Yeah, I can whack it in a certain manner, in a certain pattern and make the dent go away.” And I said, “Well, no you can’t.” There’s no way you’re whacking a dent and making it go away. You might think it goes away but if you move the light into the right position you are going to see a trough or you’re going to see something that’s there still. I know it. So I called BS on you Mr. Shane and we’ll have to wait until we meet in person and you can show me how right I am.
So that’s what I thought and then you did show me in person and there is no trough. It is blended out. It is flat. So I thought, okay, just like glue pulling in my career, I’ve got to stop saying something doesn’t work until I see it and talk properly.
So once I saw you blend out the small dent and make it go away relatively quickly then we started talking more and that’s when I realized that this isn’t the only purpose of what you do. That’s just kind of an added technique on top of using the hammer for all your knockdown techniques.
Shane Jacks: Right.
Keith Cosentino: So you’re knocking crowns with it. You’re knocking high spots. You’re opening up dents just the same way we would with the tap-down. You’re doing all that with the hammer and it just so happens when there’s a small dent you can just blend it with the hammer. So to say everything is, you know, to term it all blending together is kind of misleading I think because that’s what –
Shane Jacks: Extremely misleading, actually.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah.
Shane Jacks: Yeah.
Keith Cosentino: It’s almost like you have to come up with a new name for it to describe the fact that you’re doing all the tap-down work with this hammer. But everybody calls it blending so that’s what it’s going to be.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. I don’t think we’re ever going to get away from that term to be honest with you.
Keith Cosentino: No. Probably not.
Shane Jacks: But like you said, it’s a misnomer and it’s a very small part of what I actually do with the hammer. Actual blending, that’s probably five percent of what I’m using a hammer for.
Keith Cosentino: Because you’re working retail most of the time. You’re not on the hail most of the time.
Shane Jacks: Right, right. Now, in hail it’s a bigger percentage. So basically what you’re saying Keith – I know everybody out there – you guys right now are saying well, I have no idea what you’re talking about why – what are the benefits of the hammer over a hammer knockdown. And it’s all to me and again I –
Keith Cosentino: Can I interrupt you?
Shane Jacks: Yes.
Keith Cosentino: Can I interrupt you. We’ll take a baby step back.
Shane Jacks: Okay.
Keith Cosentino: Did you invent this process? Were you taught with a tap-down and you switched to a hammer or tell us how this all started with you.
Shane Jacks: Oh, okay. That’s a good point, Keith. No, I did not invent this. Let me be arrogant. I didn’t invent it, I just perfected it.
Keith Cosentino: Okay.
Shane Jacks: Just kidding, just kidding. When I was at the BMW plant – most of you know that’s where I got my PDR career started. If you don’t, the BMW plant here in Greenville or Greer, South Carolina, I was hired on as a mechanic and within a month was the PDR tech, okay. I went out and did some training.
So anyway, I come back and they sent Germans over. I went to actually Keith’s kind of neck of the words, south of him, into Oxnard, California, into a facility –
Keith Cosentino: I’ll tell you what, Oxnard is northern California’s version of Temecula without the nice houses.
Shane Jacks: But man, Malibu is so close to Oxnard that –
Keith Cosentino: That’s nice.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. It’s like a 15-minute drive. Anyway.
Keith Cosentino: That’s what the people in Temecula think Temecula is. Malibu.
Shane Jacks: I’m staying away from that. So I’m out in Oxnard and this is an American tech that I learned for a week from and he’s got a hammer and a knockdown and he’s doing a little bit of blending but a lot of hammer work.
I come back to the plant. They send Germans over to train me and they’ve got hammers. I’ve got a knockdown in my hand, right? Now, some of this is fuzzy. I may not have gotten a knockdown for quite a while but, anyway, at one point I acquired a knockdown and the German that was training me took the thing, threw it in the trash, took it out of my hand, threw it in the trash and then in his best English, which was broken to say the least he said, “This no good. This for girls. Hammer for boys.”
Now he did get it back out of the trash because it was a joke. A joke that he meant, though, you know. Which is really good for a German, to actually make a joke. They’re not very good at that and don’t take jokes well. But anyway, I have this – they’re teaching me with a hammer and that’s the only way they want me to learn. They do not want me to use the knockdown. I’m really grateful that that is the case when we started. But that’s what they did is force me to use that because now my repairs are what they are mainly because of the hammer.
The reason they wanted me to use it, they wanted me to learn it, I didn’t really understand. Again, the language barrier was huge and they were trying to explain to me that this is the way to go but I didn’t understand why. Why can’t I just use the knockdown? It seems easier to place. And it makes sense, right?
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, you hold it right where you want it.
Shane Jacks: You hold it right where you want it.
Keith Cosentino: And then whack it.
Shane Jacks: However, using the hammer — again, I can’t prove this. I haven’t proven it yet actually. Using a hammer, metal on metal contact causes vibrations in that panel that you just cannot get with metal and metal on plastic or plastic on metal from a knockdown, or even metal knockdown on metal. Whenever you’re using a knockdown, Keith, how close is your hand, your knockdown hand, to the actual damage when you’re resting it on the panel? How far away from the high spot, or whatever, are you – is your hand resting from it?
Keith Cosentino: Two to four inches.
Shane Jacks: Yeah, I would probably say closer to two, actually. So when you’ve got your hand on that panel you’ve got that one hand really close to the damage holding your knockdown. Do you think that’s dampening the vibrations there within that panel? I’d say it is.
Keith Cosentino: Absolutely, yeah.
Shane Jacks: I’d say it is. If you can use a blending hammer that’s 12 to 18 inches long or whatever and you’re 12 inches from the damage and you’re metal striking – what you’re striking the metal with is another metal object and the dampening agent being your hand is that far away you’re going to get a lot more vibrations in that panel. Does that make sense?
Keith Cosentino: Sure.
Shane Jacks: Okay. Now, metal when it vibrates it’s – when you’re blending, true blending, what we talked about earlier, the five percent that I’m using it for, those vibrations help that dent come out. Are you technically blending it in some? Well, of course you are. You are making the dent a little bigger, a little broader. But as Keith said, if done correctly that dent is going to virtually disappear. It’s something that 99 percent of the best dent guys out there aren’t going to see if done correctly and done on the right kind of dent, okay?
As for other damage that you’re not technically blending out, it’s still the vibrations are helping you to push that damage up to release a whole lot of pressure that I just don’t believe can be done with a knockdown.
We actually have a video up on our YouTube page, our PDR College YouTube page. Keith, have you checked that out yet, the one where I am blending out the grind marks in the door?
Keith Cosentino: I don’t remember if I saw that on Facebook or somewhere else.
Shane Jacks: Yeah, it was on Facebook and it’s up on our PDR College YouTube page also so you guys can go check that out. And again, this is – beginning to end it’s a little long. You can skip over. The reason I recorded the entire thing was to prove that I did not put a tool on it. But you will see this blending out some pretty deep troughs in there and there are no valleys. Again, if done correctly there are not going to be any valleys. There are not going to be any troughs and it’s going to be flat again.
Blending is advantageous in so many ways. Not only is it putting the vibrations back in the panel and releasing pressure but also you’re – on paint I’ve had – gosh, it happens once a week probably – the body shops down the road. How about you Keith? Where they call you and they’ve got something that they’ve painted and it has a grind mark or they missed a really shallow spot in it, the body guy did. And you can’t glue pull it and it’s inaccessible.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, all the time. I hate those jobs.
Shane Jacks: Yeah.
Keith Cosentino: Bad body work jobs we call them. We get them all the time especially from the shops that are trying – they’re high-end shops but they’re also high volume so they blow stuff through sometimes just to try to get the numbers. They’re real numbers based, you know, the corporate’s always breathing down their necks for five percent more than they did last month so they’re always trying to blow stuff through the shop and all the time it gets blasted in prep in the paint department. And they DA it out and put all these – you walk through there and you see the guys with the DAs all standing up on the corners trying to sand stuff out real fast.
Shane Jacks: And that’s where that stuff comes from.
Keith Cosentino: I’ll see you idiots in two days.
Shane Jacks: So that kind of stuff we’re having on rails, on, you know, quarter panels that are inaccessible. It happens quite a bit. If you can get behind it, great, push it. But it happens – again, like I said, if you’re doing a high volume work and you’re really pushing it and you’re killing it and you’re doing body-shop stuff you’re gonna have this stuff come up. And being able to blend that out without having to glue pull and without taking that chance of pulling the paint is huge. There are many times that had I not known this skill, Keith, I would have completely passed.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah.
Shane Jacks: Because I do not want to pull paint on the car. Yeah, okay. I can set a disclaimer. Hey guys, this could pull paint but are you –
Keith Cosentino: Right.
Shane Jacks: A hero then if it pulls paint?
Keith Cosentino: Right. And on those jobs they might roll it, you know. They might send it down the road.
Shane Jacks: Right.
Keith Cosentino: They want to make it perfect but they’re not going to repaint it.
Shane Jacks: Right.
Keith Cosentino: You yank that paint, they’re going to repaint it.
Shane Jacks: Correct. Now the week that I posted that video I had three of those from the same body shop and almost all looked exactly the same.
Keith Cosentino: That video is supercool. It’s neat to watch. I mean, like you said, probably could have been a time lapse in the middle but it was just a quick film it and throw it up there for everybody to see what you can do with that hammer and with the right skills.
Shane Jacks: Right.
Keith Cosentino: And I’m glad you put it on the Facebook page. I really want you guys to go over to our Facebook page and make sure you Like it because we’re going to do a lot more interaction through the PDR College Facebook page. We’re going to have some exclusive stuff just for our Facebook fans.
So make sure you’ve clicked that little thumbs up button so you’re part of our world over there.
Shane Jacks: Yes. Come to our Facebook page. We’re putting new stuff –
Keith Cosentino: We have cookies.
Shane Jacks: On there every now and then and need to make that more, just to be honest but would like your interaction there for sure. And that video is up there. Some other stuff also.
What else, Keith, about blending? Comfort? That’s a huge thing.
Keith Cosentino: That is something that you don’t know you need because most guys are comfortable with the tap down. It is comfortable but you don’t realize that it could be a little more comfortable with a hammer and listen, I use this blending hammer every day but I still use my knockdown. That’s how I knock things down. That’s how I’ve been doing it my whole career.
I’m not making a full switch but I am slowly getting that hammer out more and more and I’m blending small dents out of rails so I don’t have to go bother if my glue’s not set up and all of that kind of stuff and get the whole kit out.
On a hail it’s different because you have everything set up on your cart and you’re ready to go but on a route if I’m finishing a car and notice it’s got a low spot in a rail, yeah, I can glue pull it or I can blend it. I can blend it now. I can glue pull it five minutes from now so that five minutes is important to me. So I’m using it more and I’m using it to knock stuff down from just a little farther away than I can get with my two hands, tap down and hammer.
So when I’m doing real precision work and I want to just get that extra two, three feet away and get that long look with my face plastered up against the metal because I’m trying to make it perfect, I can get all the way down there and then reach my hand all the way out with the hammer at arm’s length and make a small adjustment that I physically can’t make that with a tap down when I can see it like that.
Shane Jacks: That image is beautiful because that is exactly what I was going to explain.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, and you know what?
Shane Jacks: Getting that stretch out. What do you do to fine tune a dent? You move your light away, right? You move your light away –
Keith Cosentino: Or your face.
Shane Jacks: And in or away from you and closer to the panel, correct?
Keith Cosentino: Yeah.
Shane Jacks: When you’re fine tuning. Why not move your head also?
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, you need to.
Shane Jacks: Yeah.
Keith Cosentino: Because when you’re done and you’re trying to make sure the car looks nice what do you do?
Shane Jacks: You back up.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah. Walk around it.
Shane Jacks: So what we’re trying to give you right here, we’re trying to give you a way to take your left arm draped over the side of your left ear, your left foot up on the quarter panel of the car and I’m being a little – exaggerating just a bit here.
Keith Cosentino: I’m picturing a rap video already. Your left foot’s on the quarter, you got a bikini, your left hand is draped across it.
Shane Jacks: Yeah and you’re twisted sideways looking up through the top of your head and you’re trying to use that knockdown and hammer and you’re pretty close to the damage. Okay, take that left hand away, take that left foot off the quarter panel, get in a comfortable position, turn your head back sideways and use a blending hammer and make everything easier. It’s insanely easier. I’m so glad I that I was forced to learn with a hammer.
Now let me go back just – Keith, you said I do everything with the hammer. I do a little bit with the knockdown if it’s an extreme, not even extreme, if it’s a fairly sharp high spot, I will use a knockdown. Or if it’s in a really – out in the middle of the roof and it’s floppy, you know, the more floppy the panel the more spring that it has the less effective you’re gonna be because you’re gonna have to back your hammer up. The swing is gonna have to be a lot longer so the accuracy is going to drop some.
As far as true blending you’re going to be doing this. And again, I’m going into another subject here. But as far as true blending what you’re going to be blending is convex areas, no flat areas. You can’t blend the middle of a roof. It’s not gonna happen. You’re gonna have a trough then, as Keith said before. You’re going to be blending, you know, the rounded top parts of fenders before the body line. Doors, the top part that are rounded.
Keith, Z3s. Worked at the BMS plant, right?
Keith Cosentino: Yeah.
Shane Jacks: The Z3s, the doors. What is the shape of that thing? Everybody –
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, it’s all round.
Shane Jacks: I mean it’s probably one of the most round doors out there. Those things will blend like – it’s unreal what you can blend out of one of those doors because shape of the door, the pressure, its wanting that dent to go back to where it came from with the way it’s stamped and rolled and you can blend so much of it. I mean we were blending fools when that car was out.
Now cars are kind of going back to the more flat especially on the dead side from the body line down. Going really flat again. But the top parts of the doors are still rounded. The top parts of the fenders still rounded and that’s the areas that you’re going to be using this blending hammer in are the more convex areas. Works great.
Keith Cosentino: But you are still using it on a roof but you’re using it to do knockdown work, basically.
Shane Jacks: Correct. Yes.
Keith Cosentino: You’re gonna push crowns down –
Shane Jacks: Yes.
Keith Cosentino: and all that kind of stuff.
Shane Jacks: Yes.
Keith Cosentino: But it’s not that you can’t use it on the flat panel you’re just not trying to make a small dent disappear with a hammer only.
Shane Jacks: Right. True blending. That’s why I said that true blending is only going to be done when you’re actually blending the dent out. It’s only going to be done on your convex areas. You cannot do it on a flat area.
Keith Cosentino: How long does it take you to teach somebody blending? Does it take as long as learning PDR in the first place?
Shane Jacks: It’s a lot like PDR. The learning curve is great, the teaching part is actually way quicker than PDR. There’s so many variables to dents that are – your impacts from inside of the car are never – unless you’re shutting a hood on a reservoir lid, you know, unless you’re shutting the hood on that and causing a huge high spot in the hood, you’re not going to be using the hammer for that anyway. You’re going to be using the knockdown, right? So you can’t teach you that.
Dents, when you’re learning how to do dent repair there’s so many variables in dents, the depth and creases and large impact areas. All that. With this you’re either knocking down a slight high spot or a crown or you’re actually blending the dent out. So teaching it is not hard at all. It’s the practice after that that takes a while. It takes practice. Keith, you know that.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, I sure do.
Shane Jacks: It takes a good bit of practice to get proficient at it.
Keith Cosentino: All you guys listening, you know, you’re all PDR technicians already. You’re already doing this for a living all day, every day. So you don’t need to learn light placement. You don’t need to learn how metal works. This is just another technique that you need to learn. So teaching from scratch like Shane learned, that’s a different story. But you know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish already. You just need some time with Shane to show you how to hold it, how to look at it, where you’re striking, how hard you’re striking, how many times, what to expect from results. And then you’ve got to practice.
Shane Jacks: Right. After you’re taught the basics it’s all practice. Keith is there any way to teach a guy or to teach a new tech how to do a large compression dent? I mean, yes, you can tell them start off with a soft tip to begin with, get the bulk of it up. Go a little softer. I mean a little sharper on the tip until you’re fine tuning it. Knock your crowns down.
But honestly, a lot of it is learning. A lot of it is hands on and –
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, and that’s a longer school because every complex dent is complex. They’re all different.
Shane Jacks: That’s the great thing and the horrible thing about our business. It’s great in that if you know how to read what’s going on in the damage and you can read the reaction of what you’re doing and back up and start again, you know, you’ll be an awesome tech at any kind of damage that you pursue. But if you can’t read it and you can’t see what’s going on behind it you’re just going to struggle. And that’s the awesome thing because not everybody can do that stuff.
Keith, you and I can do some smash stuff. Not everybody can at this point.
Keith Cosentino: No, no. You had to years ago decide that’s what you were going to do and keep pushing it to be able to get good at really big stuff.
Shane Jacks: Right.
Keith Cosentino: That’s what I did. Do you hear me sniffling? I got some kind of cold.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. His wife probably punched him in the nose and it’s blood running out.
Keith Cosentino: Well, there’s no blood but I am an expert at using the internet to diagnose myself so I got on Ask Jeeves and it turns out I got scoliosis, gout and too much gluten in my diet.
Shane Jacks: You know what’ll solve that?
Keith Cosentino: What?
Shane Jacks: I don’t know. Speaking of complex damage, let’s get off of Keith’s nose problems.
Keith Cosentino: It’s just manifesting into nose problem. I told you it’s gout, scoliosis and excess of gluten.
Shane Jacks: Yeah.
Keith Cosentino: Pretty sure about that.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. You may have something with that gluten thing.
Keith Cosentino: It’s either that or I’m allergic to chinchillas. I got to do a little more research. Make sure I’m going down the right path there. But I got a really high success rate in diagnosing myself. Successfully cured myself from Parkinson’s disease last year.
Shane Jacks: Where is this coming from?
Keith Cosentino: I’m just saying I’m really good at looking for answers online and finding them.
Shane Jacks: Okay.
Keith Cosentino: Especially when it comes to medical problems.
Shane Jacks: Yeah, that’s where you should go with any medical problem.
Keith Cosentino: Straight to Dr. Jeeves.
Shane Jacks: It’s one of the worst things you can do. I’ll have a tiny sore on my leg that won’t go away for a week and my wife goes on line and is convinced I’ve got scoliosis and gout and allergy to gluten.
So let’s get back to blending, Keith. I don’t think they really care about your scoliosis.
Keith Cosentino: You don’t need to pay much mind to it. I’m going to have it cured pretty soon. I’ve got to drink a two liter of Diet Coke in under ten minutes and I can’t remember if it’s corn starch or crushed up Skittles. No, it’s not crushed Skittles, it’s the powder from a Fun Dip. You’ve got to put the power from a Fun Dip with the remainder of the Diet Coke. Make a paste. Rub that on your liver, on the outside. Let that sit for a few minutes.
Shane Jacks: On the outside of your liver?
Keith Cosentino: Yeah. I might have a couple steps wrong with that. Something like that.
Shane Jacks: I think so.
Keith Cosentino: These are completely drug-free solutions, Shane. This is the wave of the future.
Shane Jacks: I’ll just pop a pill.
Keith Cosentino: If it wasn’t for the Diet Coke you could get all this stuff at Whole Foods.
Shane Jacks: You can’t get Fun Dip at Whole Foods.
Keith Cosentino: That’s an organic version of Fun Dip.
Shane Jacks: Oh.
Keith Cosentino: It’s raw sugar –
Shane Jacks: Fungus deal.
Keith Cosentino: It’s raw sugar and a tongue depressor. These poor kids trying to enjoy organic candy. My wife shops at Whole Foods. My poor kids, all their granola bars are gross. All their candy sucks. Like Whole Foods, that’s what they made at first and then they found out ways to make foods delicious and now we’re going backwards. Reverse engineering delicious food.
Shane Jacks: What do you call reverse evolution?
Keith Cosentino: We call it natural organic food.
Shane Jacks: Degenerating? You call it whole foods.
Keith Cosentino: Does your wife shop for all that stuff? Or she still crushing up Cheetos and making casseroles?
Shane Jacks: If it’s not fried, cocoa, or sugar, she doesn’t know what it is.
Keith Cosentino: You told me about those deep fried Oreos you guys made.
Shane Jacks: Holy cow.
Keith Cosentino: Out here you have to go to a fair to buy that stuff.
Shane Jacks: Or you could make it at home. It’s really simple.
Keith Cosentino: I think there’s some like laws of the universe that make it so that you can only make food like that in a trailer park. Is that true?
Shane Jacks: So now I’m in a trailer park?
Keith Cosentino: Well maybe you have a trailer just to make your food when you go back to live in your 40,000 square foot house. Your palatial southern mansion.
Shane Jacks: You’ve just given me an idea. I really want a man cave, a separate man cave, in my backyard.
Keith Cosentino: That would be nice.
Shane Jacks: Why not just have a man house? Have a single wide trailer.
Keith Cosentino: You want both of those?
Shane Jacks: No. They would be the same thing.
Keith Cosentino: Well, you can’t make a house in a trailer.
Shane Jacks: No, a man –
Keith Cosentino: You can make a trailer.
Shane Jacks: A man trailer. There we go.
Keith Cosentino: Okay.
Shane Jacks: A mailer. Are we gonna get back on topic now?
Keith Cosentino: That’s my trademark, bringing us as far away as we can and then back again.
Shane Jacks: I mean, we can’t get any farther away and it happened within like eight seconds.
Keith Cosentino: Yes. Yes, we can. Obama.
Shane Jacks: Ew, no. Not going there.
Keith Cosentino: All right.
Shane Jacks: All right.
Keith Cosentino: Healthcare. This is not that show.
Shane Jacks: No.
Keith Cosentino: Although a lot of guys that eat deep-fried Oreos and have gout, they could use healthcare.
Shane Jacks: Yeah.
Keith Cosentino: They need better healthcare.
Shane Jacks: Yes, they do. All right. I’m trying to find a way to get back on subject. Like, you know, easing back into it but I don’t think there’s a way.
Keith Cosentino: Speaking of deep-fried –
Shane Jacks: So I was eating this candy bar one day while I was blending.
Keith Cosentino: Deep-fried? Because they do those too, right?
Shane Jacks: Yes, deep-fried Snicker Bars.
Keith Cosentino: Snicker Bars.
Shane Jacks: Yep, they sure do.
Keith Cosentino: Is it a Snicker or a Snickers?
Shane Jacks: I’m not sure. It’s Snickers. It’s more than one of them, it’s Snickers. Well, what do you wear – what are those pants that have part of the legs cut off?
Keith Cosentino: Capri pants.
Shane Jacks: They’re knickers.
Keith Cosentino: What does that have to do with Snickers? Snicker is laughter.
Shane Jacks: I don’t know.
Keith Cosentino: You can neither deep fry Capri pants nor laughter.
Shane Jacks: Okay, so it is snickers. It makes you laugh more than once.
Keith Cosentino: Maybe.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. I’m sure of it. So I was eating a deep-fried Snickers one day while I was blending a large dent.
Keith Cosentino: Were you eating with a knife and fork?
Shane Jacks: Yeah, that’s pretty much how you have to eat them. They’re kind of messy.
Keith Cosentino: Seinfeld show.
Shane Jacks: I think that part may be edited out.
Keith Cosentino: It’s staying. I’m not editing any of this. It’s all staying.
Shane Jacks: All right.
Keith Cosentino: So all the guys.
Shane Jacks: So how do you carry on after this?
Keith Cosentino: All the guys that you’ve trained, you trained them on the hammer?
Shane Jacks: Yes. I train them with the knockdown to begin with.
Keith Cosentino: Okay. So you like to have a little built-in understanding of how to use a knockdown and then transition to the hammer?
Shane Jacks: Correct. Now fairly quickly I will introduce the hammer on really stiff panels because that’s where it works the best and but what’s funny is that everybody that I’ve ever trained – I’m trying a guy right now, Greg, and he wants to use the hammer so bad because the other day he’s trying to finish up a dent and he’s got his left arm draped over – he’s contorted. He’s a big guy, too. He’s muscle bound.
So he’s got one arm draped over his head trying to use the knockdown and I come over there and I said, “Well, you’ve got a little bit of a high here and then this here.” I said, “I’m gonna finish it up for you so you don’t get frustrated.” So I just leaned back really comfortably with my hammer and he’s like, “See, that’s where you have a huge advantage over me, man.”
So every time I train somebody they see that big advantage and they try to use it more than they really should to begin with.
Keith Cosentino: Because they’ve got too many things that they’re working on at the same time.
Shane Jacks: Way too many, yeah. I mean, again, I said I was glad that I was glad that I was forced to but man the learning curve was great with me. I sent a lot of stuff to the paint shop.
Keith Cosentino: I bet.
Shane Jacks: When I was learning. But I had that liberty, you know. I’d get it decent enough and then they would prime the snot out of it and paint it, you know. So I don’t have that liberty out here working on customers’ cars.
Keith Cosentino: No, sir, you’ve got to get it right first time, every time.
Shane Jacks: That’s right. But this blending, we’re talking about large damage, complex damage, Keith. You’ve got some nasty stuff like some of our – like you and I do and some of our other friends – won’t mention their names, but – that are doing some pretty nasty stuff out there. And some of these guys are using some of the same properties. Using slap hammers or blending hammers or whatever but using a blending hammer on large damage when you’re pushing on a – when you’ve got complex damage with a large crown if you put a little bit of pressure with your tool on the backside of the low spot and then hammer the crown, twice as fast. You’re going to bring the damage up twice as fast because you’re releasing pressure in two areas rather than one. Make sense?
Keith Cosentino: Yep. Just wait before you put your tool in any place backside just be careful. Be sure you got permission.
Shane Jacks: For sure. There’s a blending hammer going on in the background by the way. Can you hear it, Keith?
Keith Cosentino: I can’t hear it.
Shane Jacks: You can’t hear it?
Keith Cosentino: No.
Shane Jacks: It may be coming through on the recording. One of my guys is actually in the shop right now and he’s hammering away on a fender.
Keith Cosentino: Oh, now I hear it.
Shane Jacks: Do you? So that’s going to be on the broadcast. You guys can hear a blending in action.
Keith Cosentino: It’s real live blending. If you’re on CSI you could isolate that sound, magnify it and count the strikes for how many seconds and get your own free tutorial.
Shane Jacks: Now, wait a minute. He’s not doing it right. I’ll go ahead and tell you that.
Keith Cosentino: He’s just in there trying to jack up your recording.
Shane Jacks: But he’s learning, he’s learning.
Keith Cosentino: He’s not blending anything.
Shane Jacks: He’s getting there.
Keith Cosentino: So this is something that you’ve been training for a long time. You’ve been training guys to do it. You’ve taught me to do it over a few conversations and a few videos and I was the first one to push on you and say, “You know what, Shane? You need to bottle this up and make it accessible to more guys so you can teach them what to do.” And after enough prodding you’ve done just that. And you’ve got an entire video put together now that basically does everything you do in person with the advantage of HD video and the ability to rewind and watch it over and over and over again and you’re showing us how to blend on a video now.
Shane Jacks: Correct. And that is on our Web site, pdrcollege.com. And then you click on is it premium, Keith?
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, yeah. It’s called Premium Videos at the top of the page.
Shane Jacks: Okay. Premium Videos. And then –
Keith Cosentino: It’s the only Premium Video that we have.
Shane Jacks: Oh, okay.
Keith Cosentino: So it should say Premium Video.
Shane Jacks: Video.
Keith Cosentino: It’s Videos.
Shane Jacks: So, yeah, click on that and you’ll see there’s a small intro video there and I’ll teach you everything in there that will get you started, get you practicing blending. Again, I can’t be right there with you and really don’t need to be. You can learn what you need to learn off of this video.
We’ll show you in the video placement of your hammer, where to start blending on a small dent. Where to place your light. There’s some pretty cool tricks that we used in there, Keith, for showing how many strikes and the strike pattern that I have –
Keith Cosentino: That was the biggest part for me because I always asked you, you know, exactly where are you hitting it? And when the hammer’s going at full speed even on a video or in person, you can’t tell where the strikes are going. But when you devised that way to show where each strike was, that was a big deal for me. That really enabled me, in my mind, to visualize what my end goal should be when I’m blending because I know that my end goal was to blend the dent out but where the strikes needed to happen, where they started, where they needed to be intense, and where they needed to taper off, that part of the video was – if I just had that I think I still would have paid for it.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. It’s just pretty good stuff, showing everywhere that we’re striking.
Keith Cosentino: That’s the only place I’ve ever seen online anywhere that can show you that information. Everyone else can talk about it and try to explain it to you but here it is right in front of you, you know. There’s nothing to misunderstand.
Shane Jacks: For sure.
Keith Cosentino: That was cool.
Shane Jacks: For sure. Again, we’ll teach you everything we know about blending and that thing. There’s something else we need to talk about if we’re talking about blending, Keith. Not the technique; what else?
Keith Cosentino: The hammer.
Shane Jacks: The hammer. I’m kind of partial to one.
Keith Cosentino: Yep.
Shane Jacks: Hammer.
Keith Cosentino: I’m sure it’s yours.
Shane Jacks: Yeah, amazingly.
Keith Cosentino: Well, because you’ve been doing this so long – how many years you’ve been in PDR with the hammer?
Shane Jacks: 19 going on 38. Yeah, 19.
Keith Cosentino: 19; that’s a long time. Longer than me. With a hammer from Day One so you’ve used, I’d imagine, 20 different styles of hammers and they all start out as hammers made for something else that you repurposed for PDR and that’s old school dent removal. I mean, for you guys that have been in longer than ten or twelve years we didn’t always have the luxury of getting on line and picking out the tool you want and having it shipped to you tomorrow. You had to make your own stuff.
Shane Jacks: Correct, yeah.
Keith Cosentino: You had to know where to buy bulk steel. You had to grind down screw drivers and bend them. In a way, it makes you a more resourceful technician. But now the tool companies make everything so well you really don’t need to make your own tools and up until recently if you wanted a blending hammer it was the same thing. You bought a hammer that was supposed to be made to fix, you know, horse saddles or something or a jeweler’s hammer that some guy ground down and polished until it’s a blending hammer.
But Shane had enough of that and decided you know what, now I know exactly what I need in a hammer, what it’s supposed to be, what it should be and I’m going to be the guy to make it. And he did just that.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. Keith, again, you said I’ve used 20 hammers and that’s probably true. Jewelers’ hammers, tinners’ hammers that ground down and made to what I wanted and, you know what? They worked. They worked.
Keith Cosentino: Unicorn horn trimming hammers?
Shane Jacks: Yes. Unicorn dental hammers. Unicorn tooths. There was one hammer that I bought that was designed specifically for PDR and I liked the hammer fine but fine was not good enough. There was some things about it that I didn’t really like so I set out to make what I thought would be the perfect hammer for me and that included some elements that I knew I wanted that I was not going to compromise on.
One was all-metal construction because this thing stays in my pocket all day long, okay? It does not leave my pocket and it’s sticking out. And I would catch it on seats getting into cars and some of these hammers that are being made now the handles are very thin. My handle is thin. It’s small in diameter but it’s gonna be really, really, really impossible to break aluminum.
But some of the other hammers out there, I don’t like wood or carbon fiber handles simply because they will shatter in transit even. You going to a hail site and you got it packed in your bags or got it wherever, you have it wherever. And, you know, it drops, it falls, you’ve set something on it and cracked. You’ve snapped the handle. So that’s a weak joint.
I wanted the hammer to be all metal and I settled on aluminum because of the weight. Costs a little more, of course, but it was worth it, weight wise.
Number two, I wanted two interchangeable tips so that you could custom tune the hammer to your liking as far as weight. You may have one striking face that you like, the striking face that comes with it possibly. That’s the great – the mushroom head – that’s a great tip but you may want a little more weight. So what do you do? You throw a little heavier tip on the back. You want lighter weight? Throw a lighter tip on the back. So you can custom tune it to how you want the feel, how you want the – how heavy you want the hammer to be.
So I definitely wanted that. That’s what I didn’t like about most of the hammers that were out at the time, also. And then there’s some other things that are really hard to describe, Keith, but you can see it on the blending video.
The reason that I designed the hammer —
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, you’ve got a proprietary technique for accurate striking that doesn’t work with almost any other hammer except yours.
Shane Jacks: Precisely. And that’s kind of hard for me to explain. I’m not going to go into that but that proprietary technique, again, it gives you complete and total accuracy and you can’t do it with any of the other hammers out there. So that’s why I designed the hammer the way it is and so this thing is – and the feedback on this thing is really good.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah. People really have been enjoying having it.
Shane Jacks: Yeah.
Keith Cosentino: Myself included.
Shane Jacks: And again, if you guys want to order this hammer it is at blendinghammerpdr.com or dentcrafttools.com.
Keith Cosentino: What about for the wankers?
Shane Jacks: For the wankers? For the wankers overseas across the pond, tdntools.com.
Keith Cosentino: So you don’t have to pay the shipping.
Shane Jacks: That’s right. Jordan Fisher and the boys over there.
Keith Cosentino: And the duties.
Shane Jacks: Jordan Fisher and the boys over there doing good things across the pond. So those are the three places that you can get the hammer and so I encourage you to get both and learn this blending or if you already know blending, hey, pick the hammer up. It’s a great hammer.
Keith Cosentino: You know what I think we should do? I think we should put the video and the hammer together on your Blending Hammer PDR site so if you buy them both you can get some kind of a deal.
Shane Jacks: We could do that.
Keith Cosentino: All right.
Shane Jacks: For sure.
Keith Cosentino: Let’s see if we can get that handled for the guys.
Shane Jacks: We’ll do that.
Keith Cosentino: That would be cool.
Shane Jacks: So be looking for that, soon.
Keith Cosentino: So Shane, you use the hammer all the time. Tell me your biggest win with that hammer. Like I’d imagine it’s probably doing hail, like blending a rail or something like that.
Shane Jacks: Yes, sir. It was. It was working in Tennessee. I don’t even remember the name of the town. It’s right on the Alabama/Tennessee line and I was doing some hail there at a small body shop a few years back and I believe it was a Jeep Liberty, if I’m not mistaken. And this thing had really light damage. When I say light, small dents, okay. It had several dents on it. I don’t remember how many, 40 or 50 probably, dents in the thing. A small dime-sized shallow dents all down the rails and blasted through that thing in 30, 40 minutes and pulled in around 400 bucks off of that. So that’s my biggest gain I would guess.
Now, there are other times when I’ve had gains of a rail that’s written for 125, 150 and I’m done in ten minutes. So as far as money wise per minute, yeah, I’ve had bigger gains than that. But as far as like a, you know, an overall, you know, 30 minute time period making that kind of money just with a hammer, not having to pull out a glue gun or a tool or anything else. That was my biggest score with the blending hammer.
Keith Cosentino: That’s pretty awesome.
Shane Jacks: Yeah.
Keith Cosentino: Too bad you couldn’t just line those up all day long.
Shane Jacks: Get somebody else to do everything else.
Keith Cosentino: You have a couple yatchets.
Shane Jacks: That’s right. That is right.
Keith Cosentino: All right, all you guys. I want to remind you if you’ve been enjoying the podcast to comment and let us know on our site, pdrcollege.com. We love those comments. We’ve got the option of you guys going on there and leaving us a voicemail question where you just click the little box and speak into the mike on your computer.
You can leave us any kind of question you want. We’ll answer it on the show and don’t forget to go on our Facebook page and Like it so you can be part of our exclusive stuff we’ve got going on there. That’s to come shortly so we’ll give you guys some time to get in there and make sure you Like it before we start putting out some exclusive stuff there. But it’s coming. We’re excited about that, too.
So we want to say thank you, you guys, for all the support, all the private e-mails and messages you guys have sent us telling us how much you enjoy the show, how much it’s made you more money. That’s the most exciting stuff to me. You can tell me how much you like it and I appreciate that but, man, when some guy tells me he had his best month ever in ten years because he’s putting the stuff to work that we’re sharing here, that’s so freaking cool. Man, I love it.
Shane Jacks: We’re getting them. We’re getting them.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It really is great. I mean, I know we don’t talk techniques that often like we did today. Most of the time we’re talking sales and marketing and I love that stuff but you know what? Your selling and marketing could be the best in the world, if you can’t push the dent when the customer goes back inside you’re not in business. So we can’t neglect that side of the business.
I know most of you guys listening are already at a pretty high level but we can all get better, Shane and I included.
Shane Jacks: That is right.
Keith Cosentino: So we’re enjoying the interaction with you guys. We’re glad we’re helping you. Please share that feedback and until next time.
Shane Jacks: Get better.
[End of Audio]
Duration: 53 minutes
