i just found out my car has a salvage title from carfax. i wasnt told this upon purchasing. i notced a crack in my body. . . then i noticed a bondo patch where that crack was. . . then, i noticed a whole bunch of bondo in other places. i was told the car was wrecked, but that it had been a minor damage accident and that it was nothing to fix. i didnt see the words "salvage title" on my title when i had it either. it gained its salvage status in georgia. is there anything i can do? the car looks good, but i have a feeling that it is gonna go sour in a year or two. basically, i paid 13,500 for this car and i just want it fixed. i dont want to get rid of the car. i think it can be fixed, but it will be expensive. i just want the car that i paid for. can anybody give me some info?

 

Hey...call me....I might have some info for you on this subject....

 

What your car has is a salvage HISTORY. At one point a salvage title was issued then someone fixed it and the title was repaired too.

It's really not a big problem as long as the work was done correctly.
Using bondo IMO is not the correct way to do any body work on a fairly modern car.... your 66 mustang I understand....
A good shop repairs a car by removing ALL the damaged parts and replacing them with factory components. from time to time there is some minor frame parts that can simply be straightened and all the rest should be bought new.
you would be surprised what shell parts you can buy from a dealer... like you can purchase a firewall if you want...
The problem with a salvage repair, many shops cut lots of corners just to pump then out and make a few $.

I personally own 3 salvage repairs. My 7 included. Each one took me almost 6 months to crank out... I did a lot of the work myself. With top quality in mind. If you looked over my car, I would bet more then half the FDs out there would trade their NON salvage history car for mine.

As for your options, where exactly is the bondo? if it's in a replaceable panel (bolt on) it may not be too bad to fix. if not then I suggest if it's bothering you enough find a quality shop, and have them look at fixing the problem the right way (no bondo weld in new metal). This way won't be cheep. Good luck. While you at the shops you may want to ask them to point out some ways you can look at future cars and tell if they have been repaired poorly. Many cars you can just look and know (with a trained eye) do this at your won risk as they may show you more things on YOUR car that you never noticed and after knowing what they look like they will always bother you.

Good luck
Sorry you got one of the less then high quality rebuilds.
Greg

 

I bought a salvage title 93 in 1995. It cost me 18,000 when the going price for a FD was 28000 (used). I spent the 10,000 over a short time correcting the problems that were short cut by the shop that put the car back on the road. On the one hand I wish I had just bought one right to start with, but on the other hand I never would have blown the bucks on the car to begin with if it were not for the discount. Buyer beware. Open your wallet. Enjoy the ride and get off whenever you feel the need.

 

Legally you can sue the original owner who sold you the car. When selling something with a serious defect, ,the seller has a duty of discourse to tell the buyer that the defect existed. Him not telling you the car ( a major purchase) had a salvage title, was misrepresentation by silence. I suggest that you seek legal remedies, i'd be pissed off if that happened to me

 

i am very pissed off. i wouldnt be so pissed off if it had been done right. this is my first fd and i dont look forward to getting rid of it. all i want is for this stuff to be fixed. . . right. im gonna call my bank and ask them what was on the title. i dont remember seeing anything out of the ordinary on it. and he sure didnt tell me abou the slvage title. i even have a witness. i just want it right. all the mods on my signature. . . i did myself. . . and i spent a lot of time getting it right cause thats the way i am. im gonna go to a well known shop and get an estimate. they are GOOD. their painter has been painting for over 20 years. i want the stock montego blue color back. . . instead of the blue/green i have on it now.

 

damn man good luck with that, bet you feel frustrated like hell

 

Contact RXTRA7 - he is one the Nashville guys. Also the only real issue is resell value. If the previous owner didn't know then you might have a difficult time, else sue regardless of whether or not you care.... get some money!

 

Do I understand correctly that you purchased the car and then ran the carfax on it ? ? ? ? While the seller should have disclosed this salvage tittle (they usualy don't) that's why there is carfax and people use it before the purchase. Sorry for the fact the guy didn't tell you, but the service was there and it could have saved you the heart ache. Hell I've got a White 94 for 15,500 and can't seem to get rid of it and it's a clean tittle car......go figure. Jack

 

The reason you're having problems selling is right here

WHITE

I can't think of a single sports car that looks good in white.
no offense but im sure it's part of the problem

 

The FD looks so nice in white. I can't think of another car that looks as good in white aside from a c5

 

You should have ran a carfax before buying it.

 

guys............ i wouldve loved to run a carfax. i bet you didnt think about my having internet problems at the time. thats crazy isnt it. hindsight is 20/20 isnt it. c'mon guys. i wouldve if i couldve. the car looked like it was in perfect shape and i just started to surface. the car didnt look like this even after i got it and got it all nice and cleaned up. im calling my bank today to get all my info. oh yeah, if you havent seen episode 2 yet, then you need to get off of your aorry *** and get to the theatre. . . it is that good!!!

 

look........................ i am tired of hearing this bs. the fd that i bought did not have a market value of 18k. you have got to be kidding me. hmmmmmmmmmm, lets see. paul goes to the bank. he says,"how much can i get on a loan for this car?" the lady at the bank says, "it is worth $13.5k." let me think. 86k on the odometer. . . iI HIGHLY DOUBT THAT THIS CAR IS WOTH ANYTHING CLOSE TO 18K OR EVEN 15K FOR THAT MATTER!!! i am not an idiot, but i am not a body man. i am 20 years old and i doubt that i have had enough time in my life to become a "trained eye". i think most people on this forum bought their fd's for around 15k not this 18k to 24k that you speak of. how could anybody my age afford this car if it was that much. alright, im done with that. sorry about the heated words up there, but im a little pissed off about my car that i just got.

 

In your defense, if the car was freshly rebuilt, which you have not said. then some of the defects can show up later after a full cure and a few heat cycles the worst are things like bondo and spot filler. Spot filler is teh worst it expands from heat more then bondo making it come out of the woodwork if it was used as a filler of things largeg then tiny pin holes.

Im not attacking you by saying you should have had a trained eye, What Im saying, while your getting screwed GET ONE.
I will caution you here, being a body man is NOT always a good thing. I looked at a 2 week old BMW M3 yesterday... orange peel on the trunk lid but only a trainde eye would catch that.... It's amazing how many factory cars have orange peel in the paint. every single one i have seen has some.
SO maybe you shouldn't get a trained eye.
Still good luck getting your problem straight.
BTW do you mind elaborating a bit on your specific problems

 

sure forcefed1, here it goes:

top of pass. side fender- almost a foot long spot of bondo
d-side door- almost directly under the mirror there is a long "line" of bondo stretching vertically down to the bottom of the car.
top back side of d-side door (under window sill)- bondo spot about 3/4 ft. long (horizontal)

right behind the d-side door (in the transition from the side of the car to the arm that goes to the roof (between window and rear glass) there is a lot of bondo. there are 2 small cracks there also. none of the lines seem to really be even.

thanks for the help guys. ill try to get some pictures up of all of this.

 

well if I was you, I would start saving some sheetmetal parts.
you can forget about changing teh color of teh car cheeply/correctly. but teh door and fender are real eay to fix.... buy new metal bolt it on.
the part behind teh door is not going to be cheep to replace the metal. you may need a quality shop to rerepair that area.

I would PM me if you want and I will give you a site and some pointers to keep the cost lower and the quality factory or better.

This is all assuming you can do at least bolt on work yourself and don't think you'll get far with getting money out of the deal from the person that sold it to you.

asside from the part behind the door. your situation is not TOO bad.

one good thing I can tell you.
the fact that the rapair was done with bondo, if this was all the repair, is part of a sign that your frame is straight.... maybe.
If the panel were bondoable, the damage was likely not deeper then the skin.

 

Yeah, I know what you mean, I don't have a trained eye, but after I got my car I noticed a couple of things over time that don't exactly line up and I'm 80% sure it was in some kind of wreck even though I was told it wasn't by the seller, but if I had a trained eye, it would probably bother me a lot more because I would proboblay see everything that is wrong where as now its only in a couple of angles that something looks wrong. Oh well, atleast it runs as promised...

 

I spent 16 hours in the last 2 days "fixing" some spots in my hood that my wife could barely see even after I pointed them out.

my friends see an AWSOME job... I see swirl marks from the polishing that require hand removal.
my car being black doesn't help things.

 

Salvage or reconstructed cars aren't necessarily a bad thing. What the title SHOULD do is make you look at the car very closely.

I've built two FD's with salvage titles. One was a theft recovery with no body damage, just a stripped interior. The other was an engine burn, a burn so minor the upper intake, throttle body, alternator, etc were all fine. Both of these cars had original paint that looked good (theft had key marks though). I sold these cars at a $3-5K discount because of the title. If the buyer wasn't worried about trading the car in at a dealership they got a really good deal.

If you check the price of parts and imagine what gets broken in the front of an FD from a minor bump you'll see that it will be totaled. Replacing JUST the front bumper cover will cost over $1000, screw up ANYTHING else and the cost will jump very quickly. The thing to becareful on here is that you have GOT to make sure it was fixed correctly. A wrecked and fixed poorly car will cost you far more than you'll ever save.

Flood cars can be good deals too, the electronics of the FD are very easy and cheap to find used (because they don't go bad). Replace all the electrical stuff and you'll have a nice cheap FD with a "bad" title.

The key to a salvage/reconstructed car is too have an experienced bodyman look at it. If you don't know what your doing don't buy one.

Jeff

 

the car seems to have been sideswiped. so there is a lot of stuff wrong with the d-side oh yeah, does anybody have this problem. . . . when only the d-side window is down and i get up to highway speed i get a horrble flutter. it makes my d-side eardrum throb. anybody else have this prob.

 

I'm curious. Have you seen a factory Montego Blue FD?

Mine looks blue when it is cloudy out and a definite green metalic when in sunlight. They are supposed to look that way.

 

That is normal with all the FDs I've had.

Jeff

 

okay, cool. thanks jeff


grampa, yes i have seen one before and this just has a little more green in it. you can tell when you open the door or pop the hood. it is different. the color is not bad. it actually looks good, but i want it all to be the same color, ya know.