Well if trying to bring old cars back from the dead isn't bad enough, there's the matter of the occasional accident that occurs and takes an otherwise good car and turn it into something that also needs to be brought back. In our case, the Scion literally took one up the ass at a traffic light, causing damage to the rear hatch and the body member where the hatch latch is located. The taillights were destroyed just the same and the rear bumper and foam pad underneath were damaged. Surprisingly the glass that makes up 2/3 of the rear hatch wasn't shattered. The hinges for the hatch were distorted some. After all was said and done, we got the car back after the insurance people did their part since this thing's got a new engine among other things. I'm not giving money away like that. So while the lawyer people do their part, its time for me to get to work doing what we do around here, this time with the Scion. The first thing I have to do is disassemble everything so I can get a good idea of what I'm working with. I had to start off with removing the hatch since this is the single most dangerous thing to deal with. If the shocks fail, this heavy piece will fall down and crush anything in its way. This of course took the both of us to do safely as I had to pop the shocks from the hatch then have my fingers under the pinch point that exists at the hinge area while removing the four bolts holding the hatch in place. It is here I found the hinges were damaged some. Hopefully I'll be able to just tap them back straight again without having to do anything else extra. I also had to pull the interior skin from the hatch so I could remove the entire wire harness from the hatch body, which was hardwired into the rest of the wiring. The hatch didn't have a removable wire harness so this is a dumb design in the electrical system. Once I pulled the wiring from the hatch we were able to completely remove the hatch from the car. The next order of business was to remove the destroyed taillights. These are completely unsalvageable so once they came out they will be going straight to the trash. With that taken care of along with the two rear most interior panels that had to come free to allow me to access the studs on the taillights, I moved on to the bumper skin, bumper pad and the metal bumper member. The bumper skin wasn't really damaged for the most part, the plastic clips and protrusions that hook to the body to hold the piece in place were still intact. This bumper was already compromised from a previous impact but since we're making repairs, it's only fitting to just go ahead and replace this mess so we aren't sitting here trying to use a heat gun to work out the dented plastic. After pulling the foam pad I removed the metal inner bumper that actually can be considered a bumper in the old terminology. This member was intact and not distorted in any way, which is good, one less component we'll have to source. After looking at the rear inner body panel that was exposed once the bumper components were removed, I determined that it would actually be easier to just cut out the section of the inner body along the seams where the components were spot welded together and cut the same section of body out from a junkyard car and weld this metal back in place. This is the same thing I had to do to the Tracker a year ago when that car was damaged. Since the body members were made in a way to allow me to use the grinder to cut out a large section of the rear pretty quickly, this was a more viable option than trying to hammer out the old body member and hope to have it be straight enough that everything would go back together properly. With everything removed that I needed to remove, the next move will be to hit the junkyard and try to source all the parts we'll need to make the repairs to the car and bring it back to the state it was in before the accident. I may even feel compelled to do some other repairs to the rear quarters with these extra repairs being done since I would have to restore all of this area before we could ever consider getting a rebuilder's title for this car again. We'll see how that works out to determine if that's even an option later. In the meantime we need to hit the junkyard.
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