Appreciation post: finally fixed a 2 year old BMW door alignment issue

The body shop down the street had tried adjusting those hinge bolts 3 times without touching the fender gap and it still sat 3mm off. I loosened the fender, shifted it 5mm forward and torqued it back in 20 minutes flat, now the gap is perfect - anyone else find shops skipping the obvious stuff?

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2 Comments

zara_hill463mo ago

Is it just me or do body shops see extra screws and bolts as some kind of personal challenge to ignore? I spent a whole afternoon trying to fix my trunk gap once and realized they had left a washer on the wrong side of the bracket. Makes you wonder if they're all secretly playing a game of "how long can we make this take" while we're not looking.

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benk263mo ago

lol @zara_hill46 you hit the nail on the head. I swear they must have a secret meeting every morning where they decide which bolt to leave loose that day. The washer on the wrong side thing is classic, that's the kind of mistake that takes an hour to trace back but they'd argue it's "close enough." It's like they think extra hardware is just decorative or something. My buddy had a whole bolt just sitting loose in his door panel after a repair, rattling around for weeks before he found it. At this point I'm convinced they're just speedrunning the assembly instructions backwards for the fun of it.

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