The Updates

Conan Dombroski's blog

Thursday, January 4. 2007

Posted by Conan

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The Updates

Ok, for all those who have been dying to hear what's been happening with the car (that would be Ken), here's the scoop:

As you can see from my initial blog entry, the damage was totally contained to the left-front corner, with the body and the oil cooler bearing the brunt of it all. Originally, the body shop (Rehms Auto) that tore the car down, wrote an estimate for the insurance company (Allstate) for roughly $12,000.00. When Allstate told them the damage wasn't going to be covered, Rehms "graciously" made me a deal of $10,000.00. Wow! Now how could I pass that up? Instead of charging Allstate Rehms' cost + 20%, they were going to charge me Rehms' cost + 10%. Which is honestly not bad. However, it was still above my budget, and while I wasn't looking forward to it, I knew I could do 90% of the work myself.




First Impressions Can Be Wrong
Initially, I was depressed believing I needed to remove the crash structure, radiator shroud and the AC condensor unit -- not good. It's quite a task disassembling the AC condensor for anyone, let alone a weekend warrior such as myself. (note, for any figure, just click and you can see a bigger version)
It'll help you to understand my initial trepidation if you know how the front end is setup. Basically (looking at figure 1), There's a fiberglass crash structure with a radiator housing on top of it. The radiator housing also has two oil cooler mounts as part of the single mold (figure 2). The AC condenser sits on top of the radiator. Both the AC condenser and the radiator are contained within the radiator housing. At first, I was led to believe I would need to replace the whole crash structure along with the radiator housing. However, after some inspection, it looked liked most of the damage was superficial, the exception being that an oil cooler fitting had completely broken off.
Fig 1: Simplified Diagram Showing Major Assy.
Fig 2: Showing Oil Cooler/Radiator Housing
I should note that while the car is setup for two oil coolers, you only get two if you order the sport or track pack. So I only had one. After I had decided to give it a shot myself, and I got the car home, it didn't take long to realize I could just install the oil cooler on the right side instead of the left, and move the bypass from the right to the left side. This completely eliminated the need to replace the radiator/oil cooler shroud. whoo hoo!
Fig 3: Front Damage with Clam Removed
More to come soon...

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