Using Brick and Mortar to Fix a Car Fender Works Better Than You’d Think
If anyone ever claims their hooptie is built like a brick house, just send them this video.
Mechanic Jack has gone viral time and again for some pretty miraculous bodywork repairs, bringing cars that probably belong in the crusher back to life. This is not one of them.
This is a crunched fender full of bricks and mortar. It's been excellently camouflaged by the Bondo masters at Mechanic Jack's shop and ready to dole out the ultimate revenge for the next person who dares to crunch the same fender.
What you're looking at here is a mid-2000s BYD F3, a popular Chinese compact car that's similar to a Toyota Corolla. There are a couple of other filler-happy visual fixes in this video, but it's this F3 right at the beginning that's the real star.
To start, the team cuts out the most crumpled piece and straightens out the edges around the hole. That's when the bricks and mortar come out, with bricks filling in the F3's rear quarter-panel. A piece is cut to match the trim around the wheel. Eventually, all of this work gets plastered over and smoothed out to match the contours of the car, and covered in poly putty to smooth it out further.
When it's all painted up, it looks surprisingly slick—at least in a 720p vertical web video. I wouldn't recommend driving it, but I am impressed with the skills on display here.
The other "fixes" in the video are no slouch, either—filling a hammered-in van hood with a wooden tabletop is wild stuff, man. It's just that filling in a fender with bricks feels especially fitting if you're tired of people hitting your car. People keep hitting my poor, long-suffering daily driver, too. If they hit this BYD's rear fender, it might just leave an even bigger mess of bricks strewn across the other car. I don't think anyone's ever crash-tested a brick wall on wheels before.
I'm pretty sure this is why we have things like crash regulations and routine vehicle inspections, but there's a part of me that gets it. This BYD is now like a booby trap for bad drivers. Either way, don't hit this "repaired" F3—that's downright dangerous.
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