Fender Fix

I think it's been a year and a half since I tagged the left front fender in the parking garage at the Medical School. The one estimate I bothered to get came in at $1600. It was close to double what I expected and I couldn't do it. We had just bought a new house and there were a few other things to spend money on. Zoom to the present and it's still not done.

I may not have a picture of the damaged car. Here's one of the fender standing vertically ready to be thrown out. Notice the cut steel. The headlamp would go in that round bit at the top.

I was chatting about the car with a friend who's been maintaining an older BMW 540. He reminded me about ebay motors and suggested I look there for a fender. With luck, I could find one the right color and avoid painting. I thought I'd give it a try, as one of the things holding me back was a repair that would involve perfect pain on the fender and bumper, but leave the rest of the car  in obvious need of a $2000 paint job.  I'd shopped for fenders online before, but hadn't seen the same color in a used one, new Mazda fenders were unpainted and $450, and the cheaper new fenders didn't have a great reputation for fit. So I surfed ebay. Sure enough I found a few fenders including this red one: Used Red Miata Fender on E-Bay. I was so excited that I found a red one, I bought it before I fully noticed the ding in the front. No matter. It was red, and Mazda stock. It would fit and the color would be very close. A minor ding would even go with the Beater Miata.

Installing was all screws, no cutting or welding. This page, Fender Removal Thread ,  has a diagram that shows the bolts pretty well. 'B' on the third picture is a hidden bolt that is helpful to know about. If the fender doesn't look like it's curved right when you mount it, it's because you haven't gotten a slot from the fender to fit into this bolt correctly. You can reach it from the inside easily.

As I got into the job, I realized why the high estimate from the body shop was, in fact, too low. The lamp housing got cracked and the bracket holding the two forward mounting screws for the fender got bent. All this in addition to replacing the fender, painting it and replacing and painting the bumper cover which I haven't addressed.

The bracket is labelled F in the third picture and can be seen in the bottom of the first picture. I don't have pictures of it, or the less than perfect job of bashing it back in place. The fix here isn't a perfect body-shop job, but quite adequate for this car's current state and my budget. The lamp housing is serviceable, and I'm in for $300, not the the $2500 this could have been, and the car doesn't ache for a new paint job by having some bodywork in super great shape and the rest scratched and dull (its pretty uniformly scratched and dull).