Well, where we left off - I had a fun weekend at Mid-Ohio, but Vera was a bit bruised. The past week I've been trying to fix the damage, at least a bit, to get ready for winter. I'm not terribly concerned about the bumper cover, but I did want to get the fender bent back out so everything fit correctly, prepped, and painted to avoid rust. I also needed to address the headlight - it was obviously scraped up from the incident, and a bit cloudy from age.
So, off comes the bumper, wheel well liners, and headlight to assess the damage.
Not too bad in here, but there was very clearly a crease about half-way across that pass-through that allows access to the back of the headlight. The bottom of that pass-through should have been straight, but the sheet metal beyond that crease was bent down, backwards, and twisted a little bit. Time to do a bit of straightening.
Taking some ratchet-straps and running them forward to the workbench and sideways to the doorframe, I was able to apply tension to the sub-structure there to pull it back into shape... with some percussive adjustment with a rubber mallet from behind. Simultaneously, I had to piece the headlight back together since two of the three mounting points were broken, and it was held in basically because it was pinched by the fender.
Getting those mounting points glued back on and matched up to the other side was very helpful, since I could then use them to help guide how much I needed to move the substructure to get the various pins and holes to line up correctly.
Looking much better, and sanded for primer and paint.
It's been painted and the clear-coat has been applied by now, but I don't have any pictures since I still need to do some buffing and sanding to remove a few runs - it was a bit too chilly for the spray paint to dry properly and I ran into a few problems, but overall the color, flake, and texture looks pretty close.
The headlight turned out pretty well too, although the low temperatures lead to some odd "cracking" effect across the lens with the clear coat I applied to protect the sanded & buffed surface.