Back when I was in high school, I worked at one of the local automotive body shops in my town. This was a really good shop and it had a stellar reputation, so needless to say, I learned a lot. I want to say that I worked there for three years, but for some reason, my memory fails me at times like this. It was probably more like a year and a half, but I wouldn’t deny the three year thing if someone asked me about it.
Anyway, I know how great vehicles can look after they’ve been repaired. It’s always a bit of a shock for me to see them because of the remarkable transformations they go through. It’s true though, cars and trucks can come out looking brand new after they’ve been in an accident. I have a case in point below.
I think I mentioned this before on this blog, but I guess I’ll mention it again. A few weeks ago, as I was stopped at a red light down in town, a car pulled out of its parking spot and back into my front driver’s side door. It left a big dent in it, which was extremely ugly. Take a look.
Pretty ugly, right? At least nothing majorly bad happened to the car, such as having the internals damaged. As far as the damage went, it was limited to the door itself. There was a scratch or two on the front fender, but nothing major.
The girl who backed into me was obviously 100% at fault, so there wasn’t much for me to do but have the vehicle inspected by her insurance company and then get the car repaired. I had already picked out a sweet auto body place in the next town over. They have a serious setup that I liked a lot. It’s called Image Auto Body in Madison, Maine, if anyone is interested. They obviously do very high quality work, as the photos below will attest to.
Since the shop was full, we had to wait a few weeks before bringing the car in. When we did, it took about a week to get back. Just yesterday, we went to pick it up and I was very impressed with what I saw. So impressed, as a matter of fact, I just had to share some photos with you. Take a look at this. This first photo is of the door that got hit (obviously).
I’m not sure which was better, getting the door fixed to quell some of the embarrassment of driving around with it damaged or having the car detailed. It sure is clean. They washed the outside up nicely and even vacuumed the inside. If you’re interested, besides cleaning the shop back when I worked for one of these places, I also detailed lots and lots of cars. It wasn’t until later on that I began learning about the bodywork and painting.
The door had to be replaced. The shop received the shell and had to transfer everything from the old door into the new. From what I hear, this isn’t the easiest thing to do on a BMW. There’s all sorts of strange stuff in one of these doors. It’s for this reason and reasons like this in general, that I don’t think we’ll be purchasing another one of these cars. I’d like to get something more simple.
For now though, I think we’ll enjoy what we have. I’d even like to put a really nice sound system inside of this thing. I man can dream. It sure is nice to have the car back.