DIY Front End Repair
Wednesday, October 5th, 2022: Restoration Projects, Stories, Trouble.
April 3: Limping Home
At dusk, near the end of a 2-hour drive back from hiking in Arizona, I hit a deer head-on, about 10 miles south of town. My little 4wd Sidekick managed to limp home, as I took back streets to avoid drawing attention to the smashed headlights. But only a block from home, engine temperature reached critical and smoke started pouring out of the engine compartment.
April 8: Surveying the Damage
I’d killed a large animal, with the vehicle I rely on to get to my land in the desert, and to go hiking in the mountains every week – some of the only things that make my life worth living. I was in shock, literally traumatized, for days afterwards. But there was still coolant in the radiator, and I was able to drive across town to the local body shop.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t source most of the necessary parts for my old vehicle, but they estimated that if they could, repairs would cost $4,200, more than the vehicle is worth.
Most people I know drive late-model vehicles and maintain collision and comprehensive insurance for situations like this. But I haven’t been able to afford those luxuries for decades, and in any event, you don’t carry anything but liability insurance on a cheap 27-year-old vehicle. And unlike my more “successful” friends and family, I can’t afford to replace my vehicle with something new every few years.
So I was pretty depressed. Finally I began pulling things apart, surveying the damage, and doing my own searches for parts.
The deer was sideways when I hit it, its body stretched across the width of my vehicle, so the damage was fairly uniform across the front. The upper part of the front end, which had been convex, was pushed inwards. The grille exploded, the headlights and A/C fan were smashed, and the A/C condensor and radiator were driven back towards the engine, where the cooling fan housing impacted the fan belt.
I initially thought the radiator was okay, but later found there was a slow leak, probably from impact against the condensor.
In my 20s and 30s, I worked on my 1965 VW Beetle, rebuilding the engine and the front end. But I hadn’t tackled anything like this before!
April 8 – April 13: Straightening the Frame
Of course, I was able to find a few helpful YouTube videos on repairing this kind of damage. I’ve always kept a come-along – a hand winch – for my desert trips, and I picked up some heavy-duty nylon straps at our new Harbor Freight. Luckily I had an invasive elm tree along my driveway in back that I could use as an anchor. I’ve since had it removed, so I better not hit any more deer!
The front cross-member that was bashed in is called the upper radiator support. It’s not a structural member, nor does it actually support the radiator – it just spans the space between structural members on each side, and holds the horn and the hood latch. But because it was smashed in along with the structural parts it bolts to, I had to straighten it all in place. It’s normally convex, and I used the straight edge of a board to determine how much I needed to pull it back out, winching successively at a few different points to approximate the original shape.
The impact with the deer drove it back a maximum of 3 inches, and I was able to pull it back out about 2-1/2 inches. The vehicle has a tube frame, and the longitudinal tube on one side was slightly compressed by the impact, which made it impossible for me to completely pull the crossmember all the way back out.
As you can imagine, bending all this steel was extremely difficult, and took several days of blocking my tires, setting the handbrake, winching and letting the vehicle sit for hours under tension. Then releasing it, checking the displacement, and starting all over again. But the amount of restoration I was ultimately able to achieve was adequate for everything inside to fit and function properly.
April 13: Straightening the Hood
In a big city, a person with modest means trying to fix this kind of damage would head to a junkyard for salvage parts. But here, the nearest yard is a 2-hour drive away – with a decent selection almost 3 hours away in El Paso – and any body parts I found would be in the wrong color. I wanted to try bending and beating things back into shape as best I could.
The hood was really tricky – light gauge metal but stiffened by welded cross-bracing – so I had to try a series of different wooden “jigs”, using a sledge, clamps, and my body weight, to straighten out the compound curves that had been deformed. The impact had broken a bolted-on hinge, and I was able to find that online, along with everything else that I couldn’t fix.
April 14: New Headlights
The formed sheet-metal framing around the headlights had been pushed in, and had to be pulled back out. But new headlights were readily available online, and when they arrived, the hardest part turned out to be aligning them. The screws were really hard to adjust, and I didn’t have a level space facing a wall to shine them on, and compromised with my sloping driveway and the front wall of the casita.
I live in the middle of nowhere – it’s not like most people around here are going to notice the difference…
April 19: New A/C Fan
I replaced the fan before discovering the radiator leaked, thinking I might be almost done! And then I got sick…
June 29 – July 14: New Radiator
After I got out of the hospital, and began to recover my strength, I ordered the new radiator.
A radiator is a tight fit! It took a lot of wiggling and jiggling to get it to slide all the way down in its channels, between the A/C condensor and the stiff plastic fan housing. Everything around my old engine is slathered in oil, so working with mounting bolts and hoses underneath was a messy job. And there was a lot of stuff in the way, resulting in bruised and scraped knuckles.
Meanwhile, I realized I should replace the thermostat too, so I had to put everything on hold until that arrived.
Then, I had to flush the cooling system, which took another couple of days. Unbelievably, everything I replaced worked right off the bat, and there were no leaks in the cooling system. The new thermostat even seemed to fix the engine surging problem I’d had for years!
July 14–15: New Grille
The new plastic grille was one of the cheapest parts – $30. After I screwed it on, I realized the hood needed some more work – the panel gaps at the sides were annoyingly big. I used a ratchet strap to bend it down a little more. Then I really thought I was done.
October 4: New Horn
The use of car horns is strongly frowned upon here – it’s considered the height of rudeness. And traffic is blessedly light anyway – most of my driving is out on the open highway, where I can go a half hour or more without even seeing another vehicle. So it was a while before I realized my old horn wasn’t working. No surprise – it took a direct impact in the collision. Like other parts, hard to pick the right one online, but easy to install.
October 4: Good Enough for Now
As you can tell, I was only able to work on this project sporadically over many months. I had a lot of time to reflect on what I was doing, what others weren’t doing, and what I might rather be doing with my time.
I often thought I would rather be working on my visual art project, or my music, or my book. But I realized that, although I grew up in a culture that valued craft and manual labor, at this point, I don’t know a single other person who would consider repairing their own vehicle. Not a single person – correct me if I’m wrong!
Most people I know have newer vehicles that are so automated and computerized that many of their components can’t even be repaired by specialists, and must be completely replaced when they fail. But even if their vehicles could be repaired, most people have long renounced the necessary skills and tools, perhaps believing that their superior intellects and educations entitle them to live off the manual labor of others – the proletariat romanticized by the highly educated Bolsheviks.
Even when I’m not working on the old Sidekick, I’m aware that everyone else in my unusually diverse neighborhood has newer vehicles – except the old hippie couple down the street, who cover their windows with insulating panels to save energy, and drive a dilapidated van from the 80s.
The fact is, I don’t want an automatic transmission, or power windows, or cruise control, or GPS, or cameras on the outside of my vehicle – and especially not a damn touchscreen!
I’m sure some of my neighbors are embarrassed by the old, obviously damaged vehicle sitting in my driveway. I’m glad I don’t need to rely on an automotive status symbol to prove that I’m a success. And even at my advanced age, I can agree with the young Harlan Hubbard that “I wanted to do as much as I could for myself, because I had already realized from partial experience the inexpressible joy of so doing.”
I have a pretty crappy car that is still working. One door won’t open from the outside. It’s a 2006. The paint is looking bad. I just drove it from the Bay Area to Davis and back. Still works. No desire yet to spend $30,000 plus on something more impressive.
Oh deer, Max. The odds of this happening to such damage are always mindbending but you do get out there so I guess bound to happen. I’m not sure if I ever told you the story of my bf’s Burmese stepdad that hit a deer just days after arriving in the US as an immigrant back in the 70s.
The deer was dinner! I will leave the story there 🙂
Great story! When Carson was living in Ferndale, way north of SF, I drove up to visit, and discovered he’d found a roadkill doe that was still warm, and loaded it into his trunk. There appeared to be little internal damage and he was waiting for me to arrive and butcher it, since I’d just finished my wilderness survival course! We ate off it for a week.