(Updated: added damage photos from the appraisal appointment.)
(Update 2: added photos of repaired vehicle.)
Fucking hail. That’s all I have to say.
Well, not quite. As you can see from the pic and the ones that will follow, my BRZ got nailed by hail this past weekend. We had a hella storm roll through here and at one point it let loose with golf ball sized hail that nailed my car as well as my wife’s and my son’s. Our cars are normally parked outside because our garage is full of crap at the moment, but this is the first time in the sixteen years or so we’ve been here that we’ve ever had an issue with hail. It’s happened before, but only with pea sized hail or smaller that did nothing, but this is only the second time in just over thirty years where I’ve had a vehicle damaged by large size hail. Lucky me.
Damage-wise, the hood took the worst of it because it’s aluminum and rather soft. There’s some big pock marks, but worse than that is all the little pocks that are peppering the hood over its whole surface. Those are not going to come out because there’s just too many of them to deal with, so I expect I’ll need a new hood. On one hand, that’s not the end of the world because I was contemplating getting a carbon hood anyway, but not for a while. That may change now depending on how much just the hood work alone might cost. If it’s similar or near in price, I may just skip getting it fixed and go carbon sooner than I planned.
As for the rest of the car, there’s some decent sized pocks here and there – the worst being one on the driver’s side roof transition. Apart from that though, it’s not so bad because there aren’t all the tiny pocks everywhere like on the hood. There’s a few on the roof, a few on the front fenders, and then a couple on the rear quarter panel. The suck part is trying to see them because the light has to be just right or you have to have a reflection with a clear pattern in it that will distort where the pocks are. All of them are just depressions and there’s no paint damage, so likely they would just have to do a bunch of paint-less repairs, which is probably more time consuming than anything else. I have an appointment to take it in to the body shop to get an estimate, so I’ll have them quote it with and without the hood work so I can decide if I want to go carbon or not. In any case, I’m pissed as fuck because I try so hard to take care of the car and keep it pristine with no door dings, etc., and then along comes a storm and I now have a shit ton of dings that are worse than just a single door ding.
Fucking hail. That’s all I have to say.
The following photos were taken when I took the BRZ in for the insurance appraisal. I thought I’d post them so you can see just how bad the damage turned out to be. As you can see, the hood took the brunt of the damage and according to the dent specialist it’s mainly because it has so much bracing, so it takes the full force of the blow as opposed to flexing and bouncing the hail away. The roof by contrast, which is also aluminum, is relatively lightly damaged because it can flex.
These next photos are of the repaired BRZ. $3,303 later, it essentially looks like new again and has been returned to its former glory. I am very happy with how it turned out.
