Ugh. Somebody hit-and-run my right front fender this weekend. It's not a big dent, but I can't help worrying about how well the paint will match afterwards, since I have that tricky Emerald Green Metallic paint. Every body panel on that car was straight and perfect when I bought it last summer, so I'm annoyed at myself for leaving it on the street and not pulling it back into my driveway Saturday night. (Of course, I'm also annoyed as hell at having to pay my insurance deductible because somebody decided to pull a runner.)

I left it with a reasonably well regarded local body shop this morning. I may have gotten lucky in that the dent was in the middle of a single panel and doesn't seem to have affected anything else. They're going to pull the dent then respray and rematch. We shall see.

Mostly I'm just going to be angst-ridden all week while I wait to see how it turns out.

 

Ah man, that is a real bummer. Sorry to hear that happened.

Paintless dent repair isn't an option?

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I had pretty good luck paint matching my green XJ6.

 

Call up the salvage junk yards. You can get a replacement fender for around $40. But you may have to call far and wide!

 

Why not call a few paintless dent removal places in your area

 

I think it's beyond PDR, the dent is very tight at the top and surely the metal is stretched.

Modern paint schemes are all high solids & water based with Jag codes always installed, so no worries about the match they'll probably flick the front edge of the door panel and side edge of the bonnet to blend it in anyway. Original paint is ICI. I think Valspar are the equal in the USA?

 

Thanks for the suggestions and sympathy, everybody.

Yup, that's the problem. It's a pretty deep dent, perhaps a bit deeper than it looks in the photos. There's also some scratching of the paint.

The body shop is going the route of those little weld-on tabs that you then put a bar through to pull the dent, plus whatever other PDR-ish techniques can smooth it. But they didn't think it would be possible to get it 100% smooth, so there'll likely be a bit of filler involved, too, hopefully as little as possible.

That's the plan. Getting the Emerald Metallic paint to blend completely with the rest of the car was in some ways a bigger worry for me that getting the fender straight, since the colorshifting green/blue/black across the body is really the feature. But they were pretty confident they could match it smoothly. We shall see.

It's funny ... last year I saw a high-mileage emerald metallic '99 Vanden Plas out in California with its body in good shape and thought to myself, "Hey, that's pretty cheap. I could just buy it and have an entire spare body on hand!" Sanity, a lack of driveway space, and the vision of my wife thumping me over the head with a cast-iron skillet deterred me. But now ... dang, it would've been handy to have an extra emerald-metallic fender on hand.

 

One added item, since it's too late for me to edit my initial message. The paint is Emerald Metallic, not Emerald Green Metallic, which is a brighter and greener hue.

 

Or use Car-Part.com--Used Auto Parts Market

 

Time out: as Danielsand pointed out years ago: IT IS JUST A CAR!

 

Well, yeah, but it's a PRETTY car. (And with any luck it will be again.)

 

Kudos to Walled Lake Collision on a job well done. Really, by comparing it to the other fender the only way you'd know that it had been fixed is that it lacks the nicks and scratches ... er, "road patina" of the rest of the exterior.

I can turn an occasional wrench or track down some electrical gremlins. But genuinely good bodywork remains a mystery to me.

 

Looks proper, just scored a 2000 in british racing green that has one similar area on passenger side, I'm going try the paint-less dent removal guy as he also does windshield repair & I have a rock blemish so I will err kill 2 birds with 1 proverbial stone lol.