@Theron posted:The B&W shot is money!
The damage doesn't look that bad at all. Glad your ok @Cory McCloskey
-=theron
Thanks, Theron! I was glad neighbor Dave was handy for that photo as I limped her up to my house... I suppose if I'd suffered a split lip and a bloody t-shirt, I might not have been so camera-ready.
Although... 
@Stan Galat posted:You sir, are the man.
Stan, how can I be the man when YOU'RE the man?
@MusbJim posted:DANG, Cory! Such a bummer to have your little pride & joy banged up after all the care & effort to keep it looking nice. I feel your pain.
On. our way to a West Coast Cruise a few years ago, I was in an accident in my previous VS Speedster that totally smashed the front end to pieces. Ginny & I just had some bruises and continued on our way to the West Coast Cruise.
Wishing you best of luck in getting your car whole made whole again, my brutha!
P.S. - in that black & white pic, you kinda look like Steve McQueen sitting there.
Kept on DRIVING?
Man, that's what you Marines do...
Hope to see you in SoCal sometime soon!
@Joe Fortino posted:Agree with everyone cars can be repaired, happy that you are unharmed @Cory McCloskey.
As for the overriders. From what Carey told me they are nearly impossible to get. Mine were made by Grey Eagle and the gentleman who did the work passed away. They also were ridiculously expense.. but worth it.
Awww, Joe... Those overriders are DELICIOUS! Man, do they set off your tub beautifully... I'll have to keep dreaming, but I'll be referring to these photos often!
@Alan Merklin posted:When I lived in PA the Machine Shop I used often was two blocks from me. Because I had nothing to go by except Towel Bar photos, "Randy" and I made a rough set heating schedule 40 PVC pipe then bending electrical conduit as a solid " template". In addition to making the radius look right, the other issue was the fasteners that would have to be inside the pipe ends. The idea I had was to fabricate a set from aluminum tubing and attach that with expansion plus from inside the bumper.....A few beers and we decided to shelve that adventure.......
Alan, if YOU can't fabricate overriders, it can't be done.
Dream shelved.
@cwazy1 posted:when it comes to rebuilding fiberglass parts like this, are there specific shops that are qualified to do the work? I assume you'd have to look around or send it off to VMC for the body work?
Massive stroke of luck... There's a terrific fiberglass shop not far from me.
They did a BEAUTIFUL repair of @paulellis's yellow Speedster after a faulty brake line spewed fiery fluid and melted his back end.
That's the shop I'll be trusting, and I'm hopeful. I haven't gotten back Hagerty's estimate, but I'll have it in hand when I drop off the car.
@Cory McCloskey Historically, Hagerty has been great to work with. Have your body shop contact me directly for parts. Several are pretty standard and can be bought several places, but a few items like turn signals, front bumper trim and exact body shape/thickness will be specific to a Gen 1 Beck.
also, glad to see you are OK. Damage isn't too bad at all, all cosmetic.
@chines1 posted:@Cory McCloskey Historically, Hagerty has been great to work with. Have your body shop contact me directly for parts. Several are pretty standard and can be bought several places, but a few items like turn signals, front bumper trim and exact body shape/thickness will be specific to a Gen 1 Beck.
Carey! Many thanks! I’ll be sending them your way for sure…
And thanks for always being such an encouragement on this site — we appreciate you!
"... we appreciate you." Truer words were never spoken. A Prince among men, and a damn fine fellow.
@Cory McCloskey posted:Lane, your face still looks just as the Lord made it!
I dunno... I'm not sure who looked worse in the aftermath, the car or me.
Lane. That looks pretty rough. Steering wheel or windshield?
Cory glad you did not meet a similar fate. Fiberglass can be mended.
@Lane Anderson posted:I dunno... I'm not sure who looked worse in the aftermath, the car or me.
Buddy, I’m so glad it wasn’t your teeth! 😳
@LeadPedal posted:I was hit in my first speedster back in the 90s, a Intermeccanica, on the passenger side while making a left turn. It was rebuilt by splicing another rear section onto the car and replacing door.
WOW, Leadpedal... Sobering photo! Glad you lived to show it to us!
@Bob: IM S6 posted:That sucks the big one.
So many incompetent drivers out there, and all their cars are made of metal.
Glad you had a good witness, contrasted to a witless driver.
Well; not so much anymore. Cars nowadays are mostly made out of composites and plastics....
Yeah, I guess so.
They are still stronger than ours.
The tall nosed Ford F250/350/450's and RAMs are what scare me when driving my Miata!
Exactly; watching people texting on their phones while driving drives me crazy.
The design of today's common monster trucks presents a hazard to all other drivers who are not in similarly proportioned vehicles, because the exaggerated hood height and passenger door sill block the driver's view of anything that sits lower than a modern sedan.
More than once, while driving the Spyder, someone driving an SUV in the lane to my left nearly ran me over: the driver glanced over and saw a clear lane, then drifted right to take it. I honked my horn with my right hand while putting out my left to punch the offending vehicle's door.
To @Stan Galat: no, drivers of commercial box trucks, Promaster vans and 18 wheelers did not do this, as their side view mirrors and direct sight lines were designed for utility instead of...whatever the reason the F150 etc. designers had for what they've done.
@edsnova, exactly how many common monster trucks have you driven?
I've driven crewcab pickup trucks since Ford introduced the SuperCrew in 2001. I did take a slight detour with an Excursion for a few years, which is just an F250 crewcab with a cap on it. In all this time I have never been in an accident. I just must be super lucky.
Just for clarification, the mirrors on my Promasters were horrible, and the 8” thick A-pillers were flat out dangerous. I’ve owned 8 new Chrysler/Ram vans since 2010, all had ridiculous A-pillers. Where you were in relation to surrounding traffic in the Promasters was anybody's guess. The tiny little Transit Connects we’re in now for work are a bit better, but still do better with gradual movements out on the highway.
We won’t even talk about visibility in the limo.
The sight lines on my F150 4x4 (with 33s) are an order of magnitude better. In the truck, I have no blind-spots, and I’ve just got the standard mirrors. They’re better than any other vehicle I own.
Your mileage may vary.
I drove a Ford F250 Super-Duty 3/4 ton Crew-Cab pickup for 6 years, and while you couldn't see what was in front of you within 8 feet of the bumper, you rarely get that close to what's in front of you, even at lights. The sides had big 12" X 15" mirrors with a convex section at the bottom. While the A-Pillars were pronounced, I had more trouble with the blind spots just behind the rear doors but those were covered by the mirrors.
What I've seen during many years of riding a bicycle is that drivers in general aren't really paying attention to what's going on around them. This is especially true of people driving Buicks (I'm not kidding on this). They seem to be in a different Universe altogether. So many times I'll see them about to move, MAKE EYE CONTACT with them, and then they pull out right in front of me. Of three bike accidents I know of, (Me and two others) all of us were hit by Buicks - Go Figure.
Just yesterday in the Speedster, I had some car trailing me a little too close, even trying to cut me off and speed past me on the right until I finally made a left turn into a gas station, when the car pulls up alongside on the right and some woman is leaning out of her driver's window, trying to get a photo of the car and yelling "That's a GORGEOUS car"!
All modern vehicles have silly thick A-pillars designed to hold up entire buildings. They can, to varying degrees, block out everything from entire semi trucks to mere pedestrian sized obstacles. The current exterior design language for pick-ups speaks to users desires at best and their inadequacies at worst. But that isn't the problem.
Situational awareness is the issue. A serious driver has got it, and works to maintain it. Design decisions can make it more difficult by obstructing sight lines. Our built in biases will often lead us to attribute a situational awareness problem to a particular party, often the designer, when it belongs squarely in the driver's seat. I may be seated down low, or behind a maze of structural obstacles, but the responsibility of adapting to those things so I'm safer is mine alone. Really great design can do all the things (style, efficiency, safety, etc), but really great design rarely comes from committees.
Lots of guys on the site have pickups because they use them in their work or recreation. An F 150 (or 250 or a RAM or a Silverado) tows great, hauls a lot of crap, and does it with an astonishing amount of creature comforts. The mechanical design of the underpinnings does what it was meant to do. Guys and gals will buy them because they use it and so they need it.
The exterior is designed for reasons that extend beyond utility. It is often speaking more to guys like my brother-in-law. His crew-cab Ford F-250 gets driven 5 miles each way to work in Suburban Portsmouth, NH where he works the back 40 from a desk. They don't have kids. They live in a house on 1/2 acre in a development. They outsource the landscaping and snow removal. They don't own anything that needs hauling; no jet skis, no camping trailers, no boats, no motorcycles, no dead deer from the hunt, and no farm equipment. The biggest thing in the garage that might need moving is a bicycle, which has never been ridden. All he seems to get out of it are requests to help move other people's stuff, which he declines because he has a bad back from being 50 pounds overweight. What he gets out of the truck has nothing to do with actual hauling and everything to do with how it makes him feel. He sees himself in fly-over country, looking into the sunset with a piece of alfalfa in his teeth, pondering the weather and the crops. He'll actually tell you this if you get him drunk enough.
He doesn't need a truck, but I leave him alone about it because I don't need a plastic clown car. We look at each other's choices and chuckle to ourselves while we take another sip and secretly wish we were more obviously useful and connected. The alone one feels looking over a real back 40 is very different from the alone one feels looking over countless other souls stuck in motionless steel boxes on route 95. The one is solitude and can be sustaining. The other is closer to desperation and is exploitable.
Wait, what were we talking about again?
@JMM (Michael) posted:Wait, what were we talking about again?
Whatever it was, Michael -- you answered it masterfully. I'm not sure why we have to keep coming back to this, but apparently it's important that we do
... and so here we are. Again.
Casting stones at wannabe ranchers as we cosplay Phil Hill or Sterling Moss is a bad look and pretty ironic. Lumping every truck owner into the "poser" bucket is even worse.
Hey, fellas!
After some wrangling with Hagerty, repairs are finally underway!
Fiberglass work is done, and Carey's parts shipment from Beck should arrive soon. I'll never understand the magical powers of bodyshop guys -- my respect knows no limit.
After all of this is over, I'll thrill you with the staggering ineptitude of the claims adjuster -- Netflix and Amazon are fighting over the story rights... 
More to follow as the work progresses!
Did this repair facility mention anything about how long it really takes for FG to fully cure before final paint, etc. ? In my wreck years ago the local Corvette repair shop said it need about 6-7 mos. to slow cure before finish. BS or not there ?
In most cases you can start sanding and laying any filler skim and primer over fiberglass is 24-48 hours. We like to let it gas off for a week just to be safe, but with as busy as we are these days, completed bodies sit in the warehouse for 6+ months before they make it to the body shop. The key is in curing temperature and proper resin mix. Fiberglass can naturally "creep" over time, a slow shrinking and reshaping process, but this process is increased if the temperatures get above the temperature it was cured at (exotherm temp, not ambient). It especially moves if it was under-catalyzed and cured slowly/cold to start with, or if left very resin rich which is one of the huge benefits of a proper hand lay where you control your resin content.
Kudos to the body shop on their work. When Cory sent me pics I looked at them and thought "if it was here we could easily reshape that", but most body shops will want to reclip the corner which was unnecessary in this case.
Your body shop has 2 (or 3) separate shipments of parts headed their way, some left Friday and some left Tuesday. Everything should be an exact match to the old part, EXCEPT the front bumper deco. The old trim is NLA so the ends of that trim are slightly different and it needs shaped to the bumper, which is a PITA. I explained this to the body shop but not 100% sure they followed what I was saying or why I suggested replacing the rocker deco and rear bumper deco if you wanted an exact match in all 4 pieces.
I'm reeling here.
Not about the repair (it looks fantastic) or about Carey getting exact parts out the door and working with a body shop 24+ hr drive away (he is Carey Hines, after all)
no... I'm reeling that Cory got his car into a high-quality shop in less than a month. I need a very minor repair on the limo (like "$700 minor", which is absolutely nothing in bodywork world), and I booked for July 15 when I went in on May 1. I'm on a waitlist in case somebody cancels. They won't.
Like every other skilled trade (besides mine), getting anybody means waiting. Young kids continue to shun trades, apparently so they can make less money doing less interesting work. My local body guy sold his shop for big bucks a couple of years ago after making a very nice living along the way.
My union only had 20 applicants for the new class of apprentices last fall (they were hoping to take 30). I'm not sure why every kid is pointed at the same 4 things. There are literally hundreds of thousands of good jobs out there, waiting for reasonably intelligent and reliable people to fill them.
Thanks, as always, @chines1for taking care of business whenever one of us needs some help (whether Beck drivers or not)!
Looking forward to seeing your parts in the hands of the boys at USA Customs here in Phoenix...
And @Stan Galat, let's keep pushing the trades! Noble work for smart kids...
