Vandalism- Key Scratches on a Mercedes Benz

http://tomscustomautobody.com/ 604-931-3441

Mark Bossert: Hi, it's Mark from Top Local. We're here with Alex Wardle of Tom's Custom Autobody in Coquitlam, a very highly rated long term, excellent car repair and autobody repair shop. How are you doing Alex?

Alex Wardle: I'm doing great Mark, and yourself this morning, how are you?

Mark Bossert: Good, recovering from my cold walk. We're going to talk about vandalism, something that I'm familiar with, a bit of key scratches on a Mercedes. I had this happen to my car, so I'm interested to see, what do you guys have to do to fix this?

Alex Wardle: Sure. What we're going to do here is we're going to go have a look at ... We have a 2006 Mercedes-Benz E320. A lot of people consider that, now, an older car. It's ten years old but it's still quite valuable. A customer of ours had their car parked in Coquitlam and someone had come along and keyed the driver's side and passenger's side of the car and the keying was sporadic; someone had run the key down the side of the car and it was kind of on and off on the panels. It wasn't straight across. She didn't think she had that much damage, because on each panel it kind of came on and off, on and off but it was fairly significant.

I'm just going to pull up a couple of photos of the car here. What we've got here, in this photo, is that you can see that this is the photo of the Mercedes in our estimating bay. We're looking at just kind of the pathway here of which this key scratch is going down. The key scratch is actually in between the two yellow lines. It's a fairly significant repair because ... I'm just going to flip here to the next one where the car is actually in mid-repair right before it's going to go into the booth.
You can see that, number one, to get this car back to the pre-loss condition, all the parts along the side of the car have to come off. That means the tail light comes out. The bumper comes off. The window belt moldings come off, which in this case, luckily, they weren't chrome moldings but they were black rubber molding. The door handles come off. The door moldings and front bumper and so forth come off.

The grey areas along the side of the car, that's actually the primer. We've actually sanded the key scratched out, primed the car. This car is literally about to go into our paint booth to get sprayed. The grey area is where we're going to be putting new colour. The area where you can see the base colour of the car, which is an obsidian black, that colour will still remain. Everywhere where there's grey is where there will be new colour on there. In this case here, we're doing a complete refinish on both sides. We're not blending the clear on the sail panels. The sail panel is the area that goes up from the back trunk up on towards the roof.

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