Thats very far away from me.

 

Is it $1600 away from you? Because I will drive from oregon and pick it up and deliver it to you for $1600

 

lol. I need to look at the local Facebook groups to see if anyone has one. Where did you see that one? I can't see any on craigslist.

 

car-part.com

 

I found one at pick n pull..... foook.

 

I just went through this. Just pull your fender off and pop most of dent out for now. Wait for a good match in the right color. 10 hours of labor is nonsense.

 

ya, Im probably gonna try and fix it as much as I can so I can at least open my door.

 

Because if that's all you do, it'll look like ***. Body work is all about attention to detail, and attention to detail takes time. Silver is actually one of the hardest colors to match.

You can't just paint the new panel, you need to blend it into the panels around it. The new paint is never going to match exactly, so they have to mix it up as close as they can get it (paint codes & computer scanning get them most of the way, then they trial-and-error it by eye to get something that matches in sunlight). Even then it's still not perfect and having a color shift at a panel gap is really obvious. So what they do is to spray the undamaged panels next to it, getting progressively lighter amounts of paint so that the color gradually fades from one panel into the next. The two panels are still different colors, but you can't tell because they aren't next to each other.

Then there's the materials cost. Auto paint is expensive (it's probably a couple hundred bucks just for the paint, fixer, etc), other materials, sanding, clear coating, more sanding, etc. Don't forget the CA environmental hazmat waste disposal fees, and the 10% sales tax that our state tacks onto everything.

A donor fender off another car isn't going to match. It may have been the same color at the factory (or it may not have been -- it probably wasn't made on the same day with the same batch of paint that your car was), but even if it was then it will have faded differently over the last 15 years. It may be close, or it may be really obviously different. You may or may not care, but a body shop is quoting you a repair that's done *right*, not something half-assed.

--Ian

 

As an example, these two cars are the same factory color & paint code. One was painted in 2003, one in 2016.



--Ian

 

Thanks for the insight Ian, I appreciate it.

 

The number of 22v sunlight silver variations will shock you.

 

Bring it to a paintless dent repair guy. I've seen them work some magic on friends cars with worse seeming dents. honestly the paint looks like it would buff out fine unless I'm missing something from the picture

 

Ian is 100% spot on with all of that.
Having had this done dozens of times over the years, you come to realize the difference between quality body work and janky backyard bro type work. On crappy forum pictures, both might look the same, and these guys talking about a $100 fender replacement might consider $1600 insane, but if you ACTUALLY want it done 100% correctly, it's not that far off. Maybe by a couple hundo due to astronomical bay area hourly rates, but still well over 1k.

This is a Miata though. And a track car at that. So the real question becomes: do you really need it to look immaculate? Probably not would be my guess. And I bet the are tons of other imperfections on that car. And I bet you will trash it way more each time you track it.

 

Get out the angle grinder

 

Right after the car got hit I thought of doing this. May as well.

 

No *****.

 

My ***** are

 

Then I look forward to updates and pics of you chopping your fender.

 

So I pulled off the fender to try to pop out the dent as much as possible. Also weight reduction was made


I made a "small dent" in fixing the dent.



And this is what I came up with in terms of cutting the fender. What do you guys think?

 

IMO the curve will look bad.