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I haven't posted here for a while, but still drop in to read all the time.
In late January, I had a bit of a disaster. First a bit of back story. I live in the forest and my garage is a full woodworking shop. No cars in there! When I bought my XJR I knew that it needed some protection from the elements and falling tree sap. I bought a car canopy from harbor freight for about $110. For over a year it had been working well. It really helped to keep the car clean. Here's what it looks like: (not my pic - from the HF website)
This is my car parked under it:
I woke up one morning and as I was leaving the house, walked out onto the driveway to discover that my car canopy had collapsed under snow load. Heavy snow over night turned to rain and the snow acted like a sponge soaking up all the water. The canopy buckled in the center and the whole thing came down on top of my Jag. Most of the car was covered, and I knew I had to get the weight off right away.
As I couldn't see the top of the car, I couldn't tell it the roof had been pierced, or if the sunroof glass was broken. I was worried that water might be getting inside. I took out my knife and cut the tarp. This released a flood of water and chunks of ice. I didn't know it at the time, but the falling ice left little scratches all over the car. My urgent concern was getting all of that weight off of the roof of the car. After cutting the tarp on both sides of the car, I used a snow brush to pull all the remaining snow and ice off of the tarp. I then had to cut away all of the remaining tarp from the canopy until I was left with just the steel structure.
The metal poles from the central supports had buckled and punched into the roof of the car. This left two fairly significant dents, but luckily, did not pierce through the aluminum skin. They did go through the paint and back to the primer. Also luckily, the sunroof was not broken. My wife came outside to help me, and we carefully disassembled the remaining steel structure trying to keep it away from touching the car.
I took the car to my favorite local body shop (where I know the owner does really good work). As we started looking around the car, we started finding little vertical scratches in all the panels. It was hard to see some of the scratches in the dark green paint as it was raining and the car was a bit dirty. He suggested I take the car home, give it a thorough cleaning, and then look for scratches. This is what I did.
You might remember that last year I did a thorough detail on the car. I wrote it up extensively and you can see that post here: https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/x...04-xjr-160362/ The big advantage to having done this is that any existing scratches were smoothed out and then waxed. It was easy to see which scratches were new. This really helped me when it came to filing an insurance claim.
After cleaning the car, and searching for all the new scratches, I found new scratches in every single panel on the car except for the front bumper. The end result is that my insurance company is paying to repaint the car. The auto body guy that I'm using, said that there's no way he's going to paint the whole car and not the front bumper, so he's going to do that too. He is used to arguing his point with insurance adjusters and my local adjuster seems to be very reasonable, so no issues there.
Because the car is all aluminum, the roof dents need special treatment. I'm told the metal has to be heated to 300-350 degrees before trying to pull out the dent. This also means that the headliner will need to be dropped to accomplish. He said the headliner wont need to come out, but it will have to be dropped. He seemed to think that if it did need to be removed completely, one of the windows would have to be removed to get it out. Hopefully it wont come to that.
One concern that the body shop guy does have is the hours of labor it will take to wet sand and polish the car back to the condition it was in before the damage. But, he thinks he's worked it out with the adjuster.
I suppose I could look at this as a good thing. The whole car is getting a paint job and my deductible is only $100. But the paint was in amazing condition to begin with. It's not like this is adding to the car, in fact I think it will maybe devalue it slightly. If you look at NADA or KBB pricing guides they usually say that to qualify for excellent or outstanding (only 2-3% of cars), they have to have had no bodywork or paint. All must be original! My car will no longer meet that requirement. I guess this is not really a big deal as I have no plans to ever sell my car... But this bugs me.
The car will be in the shop for about 5 weeks and I should have it home in early April.
I bought a new car canopy to protect the car when I get it back. After a lot of research, I found a much stronger one. It is made by ShelterLogic. Compared to my old one, it has much thicker steel and tarp, and had six legs versus three. It also has sides that go all the way down to the ground. You can see it here: ShelterCoat Round Green STD 12 x 20 x 8 ft.
Here's what I got:
I also installed some motion sensor lights in the top.
Wow, I posted this in March and I still don't have my car back. I've been into the shop a few times to view the progress and things are looking good. I think I might have the car back by the end of the week.
The repair shop has been doing top notch work, but it has been a long wait. The biggest cause of delay was that the car is all aluminum. Once aluminum is bent, it has to be heated to about 350° before it can be bent back or it will make the metal go brittle. The shop ordered a special dent pulling tool to work on my car, but the tool kept getting back ordered. Since it arrived, work has progressed steadily.
The shop has certainly gone above what was required by the insurance agency. Some panels were supposed to have a base color painted on part of them, and then clearcoat over the whole panel. Instead, they've sanded the whole car, applied basecoat to the whole car, and applied a thicker than usual layer of clearcoat. The extra clearcoat was to allow for wet sanding and polishing as the final step.
Most cars these days, when they are painted, are just sprayed and left to cure. This leaves a very slight ripple in the surface of the paint. Not as strong as an orange peel texture, but you get what I mean. This rippled surface reflects light in multiple directions, defusing the shine. Our cars are wet sanded and polished from the factory. The wet sanding takes off any high spots and the polishing removes the sanding marks. This leaves a paint surface that is very flat and that reflects light in a more even way. This makes the paint look very shiny (some call it a wet look).
Since insurance is supposed to put your car back in the condition that it was in before the loss, they are covering all the additional labor of the wet sand and polish on my car. The body shop had to argue with them a little, but they're covering it.
When I went to the repair shop on Friday, the whole car had been wet sanded and they were starting the polish out. Hopefully, I'll have it back by the end of the week. I dropped the car off in the last few days of February, so it is been a long wait. I'll have to take some pictures when I get the car back.
Yeah, on the morning that the canopy collapsed on top of the car, I didn't stop to take any photos. I just panicked and tried to get the canopy and all the snow and ice off the car.
The two biggest bits of damage were the dents in the roof. Here's a couple of crappy photos:
The rest of the damage was from the ice falling on the car. No big dents, just tiny scratches all over the place. That's why they ended up covering the whole car paint job.
Sorry to hear about your baby. You did do a beautiful detail job on it last year.
Living in Idaho I am in the same dilemma. I looked at shelters and snow load was a big concern. Also, sometimes we'll get pretty good wind storms and I was afraid it might drive it into the side of my car.
Glad you are getting it remedied, the shop sounds like they are doing quality work. I'm almost surprised insurance didn't total it. Though the green is a very rare and pretty color, had you considered going a different color (it would entail painting door sills and other parts the insurance may not cover)?
Thanks. So far, I've been happy with the ShelterLogic canopy. It should be much better at handling snow than the crappy harbor freight one I had. The rounded shape should hopefully help it to shed the snow. However, even this company says that you should knock any snow accumulation off with a brush before it had a chance to build up much.
In case you're interested, this is the canopy that I bought:
To stop it from moving in the wind, I bolted it to two pressure treated 4x6s, I then drilled ⅜" holes through the wood, and used 36" pieces of ⅜" rebar like nails. I toe-nailed the wood into the ground. It's not going anywhere.
As for the green, I didn't for a moment consider changing the color. I spent about 18 months looking for an XJR with the options that I wanted, and the green paint and Sepang wheels were high on that list of desires.
03-18-2017, 12:37 PM
My Poor Baby - F$%@ing Snow
