Quarter size, but it shot down with a lot of strong wind. We thought we were fine at first. I was worried about our house mostly. Then we saw little dings in the cars. Ok fixable. But I walked around the back end of my Miata and there’s an actual round hole in the rear plastic window! %$&?! Plus enough hail hit it repeatedly to bust the seam along the bottom, so for 30 minutes or so torrential rain was flooding the inside like a waterfall! We used the shop vac to suck up the standing water, and towels on the back deck and carpets. We found a tarp but it’s old and holey so we put yard bags over it first and bungied it all to the wheels.
Now what? How do we get the moisture out before it molds? I’ll have to get a new top. And I guess gut the carpet. It has leather seats and doors. And I need to find out if this is a car insurance thing or homeowners insurance thing. And it’s a 3rd car and paid off so I might just have liability on it.
Dernit!
What a total bummer!
There’s this upholstry place near us whose sign says they do convertible tops and auto carpets, boats, etc. Is it more advisable to take it to an auto place? Does it need to go to the dealer? Its a 94. What if it’s totaled? :eek:
Hopefully if you cancelled collision coverage when you paid off the car, you left the comp coverage on it. It’s comp that will fix hail damage on a car, minus your deductible.
I always advised my clients to leave the comp coverage since it’s not very expensive. You need it for glass coverage, fire, theft, a tree falls on your car, or if you hit a deer.
Yes. It will take a great deal of labor to putty in and smooth out the hail dings, and then a complete repaint of the car. And then any prospective buyer with a magnet will be able to tell that it has been damaged.
Factor in a new top and the probably damaged interior and it is totaled. It was only about a $4000 car before, at best.
Firstly, just because the insurance company would likely total the car doesn’t mean you have to junk it. It doesn’t take much to total an older car like this. If you still like the car, there’s no reason to hold hard to not spending more than it’s worth to fix it. Or simply taking the money from the insurance company and not fixing it, especially with something cosmetic like the hail dimples.
The water damage might be a little trickier though. Convertible interiors are usually designed to be somewhat water resistant so may get lucky and only really need a detailer to give it a real deep clean. The risk is that you might have corrosion on some of the electrical parts (including the engine computer which is usually stashed in the interior somewhere) but if only the back deck area flooded you might be okay there. What’s difficult is that if you do have issues with corrosion from wiring getting wet, it may take a while to manifest itself. You probably don’t want to throw a new top on or fix the interior until you’re fairly sure the car is working okay. If you can keep the car under cover and drive it on a few nice days to check it out that would be ideal, although a garage would definitely be better than keeping it under a tarp.
And, yeah, the upholstery shop would probably be the ones to talk to unless you do start seeing electrical issues. No reason to take a '94 to the dealer.
Yep $4k is a good ballpark, however it’s got extremely low miles, 50k. I wasn’t garaging it as an investment piece (minor fender bender back in 98 or 99, had whole car repainted with factory color after repair, I got diminished value from insurance, but that permanently damaged its collector desirability) we were trying to keep it going long enough to be a classic. And every time I take it somewhere someone offers to buy it, people even leave phone numbers on the windshield in our driveway! So I knew it would be worth something to Miata fans. Maybe not anymore.
I thought the body dings would be easily taken care of by those places like ‘pop-a-ding’ ? But actually, if I have to repainted again I would kinda be glad. The so called factory match was never really the same. It’s that color changing dark blue that looks emerald green in the sunlight, Montego Bay Blue. What I got though, just looks like dark navy. There’s some green in there but I can barely see it. And (typical female, I know) the paint color was a huge part of why I bought the car! And the reason I went to the dealer to get it repainted. Ugh! Live and learn.
I hadnt thought about electrical damage. It did get the floor wet, but only had about an inch or two of standing water. I took the top down and left it in the sun all day today, and it was nice and breezy too. I drove it for about 10 minutes as well and all seems fine. It’s in a garage tonight.
I googled hail damage images and boy did we get off lightly! Some people have swiss cheese holey houses and cars after hail!
Still, large or small, a hole is a hole, and they’re all a royal PITA.