I bought this Dakota with damage to the hood, headlight assembly and quarter panel. As you can see, I've removed the grille, headlight and bumper.

The headlight assembly was smashed so I'll be replacing that. I'm looking for recommendation on how to fix the quarter panel and the hood. I'm going to remove the hood and try and straight it out as much as possible but suspect I'll have to replace it. I really don't want to replace the quarter panel. It's just turned down on the inner corner, but I've never done this kind of repair before.

Any recommendations on websites, tutorials, etc?



Regards,
Bill

 

You may be better off taking the hood to a body shop and have them straighten it up they have all the good body tools.

I cant tell how bad the side pannel is in the photo.

If all you care about is looking ok not perfect bondo may be the answer.

Get it a good as you can and bondo it.

 

I'm not even sure if the hood can be fixed, since the hood's construction pretty complicated with the inner part. With my accident, the hood wasn't even really bad, but the body shop didn't even bother to try to fix it and just got another one. It may have been because the hood also flexed and made a crease about 1/4 of the way up. I'd have to find pics of that.

 

I'm going to take it by a bodyshop and see what they say. The good news is that the damage is isolated to the front corner (softball size) of the hood and hasn't warped it so I'm hoping that the can do something with it, but I fully expect to have to replace the hood. Of course I may just straighten out the front edge so I can put the grille back on and live with it but I have a feeling it would bother me too much.

Thx
Bill

 

Im pretty sure the hood will need replaced. As far as the fender take a good look under it and see if its rusting out(all the daks do) if its starting to rust might as well just replace it while you are doing all that work. You can find replacements online pretty cheap so check that out.

 

Yea, I found the pic. So yea...this didn't even look bad but it had to be replaced: