[Spridgets] Pink Sprite MK II on ebay #270611971693

[bjshov8 at tx.rr.com]

I have thought a lot about this over recent years.  My father used to have a body shop along with his garage, and in the era when I worked there roughly 40 years ago he would occasional buy a "totalled" late model car, rebuild it, and sell it.  I always thought that there was no structural or safety problem with these cars, even if they put on a clipped rear or something like that.  They welded them back together, most of these vehicles had separate frames too.

Okay, nowadays a lot of cars have designs using sophisticated analysis to dictate that part of the vehicle will crush in a controlled manner during a crash and part of it will not.  If you start sawing through windshield pillars and splicing back in roofs or whatever, who knows how much affect you will have on the crash worthiness of the vehicle.  Also if a vehicle has been crashed and part of this structure was crumpled a little, then pulled back out to reasonable approximation of the original shape, it will not have the same crash behavior if it is crashed again.  I say that as a licensed structural engineer and my knowledge of how things behave under stress.

Now if you dent a fender, crush a grille, wrinkle a hood, and all of those pieces are replaced, then structurally I agree that the vehicle should be as good as new assuming appropriate parts and workmanship were used in the replacement.  I'm not sure that anybody in the business of crash repair these days can replicate the durability of a factory paint job and that would concern me if I was buying anything more than a bargain vehicle.  I realize that factory paint jobs from some recent eras were really bad and would rapidly deteriorate on their own but I think today's factory paint jobs are pretty good.



>   And a reputable builder will put a car back to better than new 
> condition. It only takes very minor damage for a newer car to be 
> considered a total.

> > Carfax is not always thorough.  If you pay cash for repairs then
> > Carfax never knows about the damage/repair.
> > A clean Carfax report is a good thing, but it doesn't mean the car
> > hasn't been wrecked.