As I pulled into the Honda/BMW/Mercedes/Rover/Infinity/Porche dealer this
am to have the 3K service on my Accord, I saw a Land Rover Defender that
seemed curiously warped. I checked it out while waiting for the service
van to bring me to work. The left rear corner was crunched. The rest of
the body seemed humpbacked.
This was the full dress model, with a pipe rack all around the body and a
huge luggage rack on the roof. Every door was misaligned, and the body
was subtly arched and tastefully creased here and there.
A mechanic pulled up in a Range R, and asked, "Wondering what happened?"
He said the owner parked it beside her house, and it was gone the next
morning. She found it had rolled down the drive and down an embankment,
hitting the bottom rear first. He said the frame was bent upward in the
middle and, as I could see, the whole body was sprung.
I said, "Well, at least the car wasn't perfect before the accident. Look,
the rear fender was full of bondo." It was; the crumpled left rear fender
had about 1/8 inch of your basic pink bondo over very rough-looking
aluminum. The mechanic said, "That is probably factory work. Sometimes
the panels don't line up and they bondo them."
Does anyone know if that is true? I could not see any evidence of
previous hammer work on the aluminum where the bondo had flaked off; it
seemed as if somebody had ground it with a coarse grit disk, and spread a
layer of bondo over the whole thing. I have seen that sort of thing on
some Italian coach built cars, but the LR is a production vehicle. Bondo,
from the factory??
Ray Gibbons Dept. of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics
Univ. of Vermont College of Medicine, Burlington, VT
gibbons@northpole.med.uvm.edu (802) 656-8910
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