So Fresh and So Clean
It’s been years since my Mazdaspeed Miata brought a special twinkle to my eye. I’d say the disarray started shortly after an incident I had with my friend’s S2000. We had organized a canyon cruise with a bunch of our roadster buddies. Long story short, my friend accidentally forgot to fully engage his emergency brake and his S2000 rolled into my front driver side fender.
He wanted to pay for the repair work but I wasn’t in any hurry to take care of the matter. When I started thinking of how we could resolve the issue, the thought crossed my mind that I should get some fender flares and really make the Miata sweet. But I dragged on with looking into the matter and I other priorities started taking shape in my life. It was then that the Miata really started to become a low priority for me. I didn’t wash it as much, slipped a little on the maintenance. I started loosing the spirit of owning a roadster.
About a year ago, I started to change priorities. I decided to move on from a business venture I tried with a friend. I found a job in Los Angeles and moved out of Orange County to be closer to work. Although I was in good spirits with my career, the Miata started to become a major pain in the ass. With the daily dose of bumper to bumper traffic, I was starting to have second thoughts of whether or not I wanted to keep it. Miatas aren’t exactly the most practical vehicles and commuting in it is a bitch especially when you have daily encounters with traffic.
Then on February 14th, 2008, a horrible event happened. As I was dealing with my daily commute, the Miata got struck by a huge Ford F-150 that was driven by an uninsured Israeli man driving on an International drivers license. I was enraged by the whole incident.
After he struck my car, I stopped my Miata in front of his truck and we both stopped traffic in back of us. I immediately jumped out of my car and started yelling and cussing at guy. Although he was a big guy (probably over 6’), he looked really scared because I looked like I was going to start wailing on him. I eventually calmed down and quickly called the LAPD after the guy didn’t show me any proof of insurance. What’s worse, the driver didn’t own the truck. He was just a delivery guy for someone else!
It’s been an ordeal trying to get a hold of the original owner of the truck. My insurance company is currently dealing with the issue, but chances are, it will go unresolved. In the meantime, I’ve had to deal with forking out the my own money for repairing the damage on my Miata.
Because I was going to have insurance deal with repairing the damage, I wanted to go with a very reputable bodyshop fix my Miata. After advice from my girlfriend Emily, I decided to take my car to Marco’s Auto Body in San Gabriel. Known for their high quality (and high price) work, I was pretty confident that they’d be able to restore my Miata to the pristine shape it once was.
Since the damage that was caused by the Ford F-150 happened to be on the driver side door and rear fender, I had to fix the damage my friend made to my front fender. Essentially, the entire driver side had to have parts replaced and repainted. They were going to spray and blend the front hood and rear truck to keep my Miata’s metallic gray nice and even.
At first, I had to wait awhile for the estimations to get repaired and for Marco’s to get a few parts to come in. After a 2 week waiting period, all the parts were finally in and they were able to get started in the Miata. Two and a half weeks, my Miata was finally ready. I was so happy the day I was able to pick it up. Marco’s did a superb job getting everything just right.
I’m very picky when it comes to body work and they were able to meet my expectations. My biggest concern I had was the rear quarter panel. Knowing that piece was molded into the body, I really wanted to make sure there was no trace that the F-150 caused a dent. Fortunately the dent was fairly small and Marcos was able to patch it up with fiberglass reinforced body filler. You couldn’t even tell that the dent was there anymore. The rest of the car came out great too. It’s awesome that my front bumper no longer has little rock chips and is nice and smooth like the day I first purchased my car.
Although I would of preferred no accident at all, this event has somewhat reignited my fondness for my car. I’m really looking forward to this summer where I plan to have the top down quite a bit. There’s still a few small areas that need to be fixed. There were areas that were caused by my own stupidity such as my passenger side mirror getting scrapped coming out of my garage door and my antennae was bent coming out of a parking gate. Hopefully I can take of some of these issues soon, but in the meantime, I’m definitely enjoying the rejuvenated look.
Tags: auto repair, insurance, marco's auto body