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Bodywork: PDR vs Pulling/filling vs Replacing a panel

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captdistraction

GrumpyRacer
1,954
1,698
Phoenix, Az
After a bit of an incident on track I've been hunting shops to get my car repaired. Damage is to the rear quarter (since of course it had to be something that's welded into the unibody and not just bolted on) and continues into the wheel well. Given the racecar status of the vehicle, I am not looking for a perfect factory repair however I'm struggling to find shops to take this on.

I wanted to get some opinions on where this stands between advanced PDR to traditional pull/slidehammer/filler/bodywork to just cutting out the panel and replacing with a donor one. So far quotes are $500 for a 90% repair via PDR to nearly $10k to replace the quarter and wheel well (and most hover around $2500). Given the wide spread of quotes and the nature of my needing to just pass NASA's "straight from 50feet at 50mph" rule, I'm wondering if PDR can get me close, even with the panel being pushed so much and the inner damage.

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JDee

Ancient Racer
1,797
2,001
Exp. Type
W2W Racing
Exp. Level
20+ Years
5 miles from Mosport
Could you push the bulk of that out with a bottle jack and some well placed blocking? And the minor left over stuff would get a decal that says "Because Race Car!". Or perhaps the ever popular "Ouch!" decal.
Personally, I'm OK with some war wounds on race cars. It speaks to the history side of things. I once put a decal that said "Thanks Paul" on a wound. Paul, of course, was the perpetrator, a good guy and he got it. A good laugh over beers. LOL!
 
For $500.00 why not try the PDR, 90% seems like it will be good enough for what you need. If you have not seen what they can do with the PDR stuff there are some amazing videos on youtube etc. A buddy had similar damage on his GT350 from a careless driver. The insurance is paying big money close to the 10k for a similar amount of damage to your pics and he has to take it back because they did a poor job, there are several pinholes in the filler. Paint and new decals will probably cost $500 by themselves. Good luck.
 

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