OMG; my 40th needs a new roof!

Originally Posted by Verticity

Fellow Z owners,

I'm the second owner of a 40th Z I bought in June 2011. Although I'd been assured it was in mint condition, 18 months after buying it, paint is cracking and chipping on the roof, apparently due to a shoddy attempt at covering up some kind of damage. The repair is estimated at over $2000, but I'm most concerned about matching the paint.

I'll tell you the story to get it off my chest, but I'm mostly looking for advice about how to get it fixed right. I'm thinking about trying to find a paint shop that specializes in exotics and classics so I can be certain it'll be perfect, but I'm not sure.

As soon as I saw pictures of the 40th edition, I knew I had to have one, even though it was too late to get one new. I looked locally for months with no luck, so when I heard about one with 5k miles that was traded to a BMW dealer near Sacramento toward an M3, I had it checked out by the nearest Nissan dealer who said it was mint and then bought it sight unseen.

The first problem surfaced this summer around 10k miles when the commonly reported transmission bearing rattle became relentless and obnoxious enough that the dealer insisted on replacing it. Not wanting to sacrifice a numbers-matching vehicle, I agonized over the decision until last week when I finally decided a free warranty replacement now was better than an out-of-pocket rebuild later. I used the opportunity to save on some labor and had new headers and an exhaust installed at the same time.

I'd just returned to the dealership from my test drive and everything felt great. My service rep was in the midst of admiring the beautiful Graphite color when he pointed to a 1-inch long, C-shaped crack on the roof where the paint was separating from the body and asked, "What happened here?" It clearly wasn't new, but not having examined the passenger's side of the car anytime recently, I'd never noticed it before.

The string of expletives that escaped my mouth must have caught the attention of the service manager, because he came right over to investigate.

After looking at the damage closely and the rest of the roof for about 30 seconds, he asked, "Did you buy this car brand new?"
- "No."
"You're aware that this car has been painted before though, right?"
- "Uh, what?!"
"The paint is peeling because of bad body work. I'll bet anything there's body filler under there." Tapping his fingers all over the roof and shaking his head at the changing timbre of metal versus filler, he concluded that the roof had been damaged and filled in several places. "And if you look closely along the roof gasket, you can see the overspray. Here you can see where the color was built up and here's where the clear coat mask is. I used to paint cars for a living. I can guarantee you it didn't come from the factory like that because the gasket would have been installed afterward."

I'm not sure how to describe the disappointment and anger that washed over me in that moment, but I'm sure you understand. On one hand, I'd bought the car used, so I couldn't expect it to be perfect. On the other hand, since the sale was online, I did as much research as possible. The re-selling dealer's report was flawless, the Carfax was clean, Nissan's service history of the car was good and I'd even paid the nearby Nissan dealer to pick it up, drive it back to their shop and perform a thorough inspection, including a check of the VIN to ensure it was factory-built as a 40th Anniversary car and that it didn't have any signs of accident damage. Everything had come up roses, so I pulled the trigger. Now I felt like I'd been scammed.

Doing a more thorough inspection of the roof revealed another half-dozen signs of cracking and crazing in all of the spots where the timbre was wrong. It's clear that at some point, the roof must've been mangled.

After that, we searched high and low and never found any more evidence of body work, panel bolts having been removed, cracked paint on the chassis, or a single other detail out of place. Considering that the damage is localized to the roof and it came from California, hail damage seems impossible. Was it the victim of an angry golf club or baseball-bat-wielding girlfriend? Maybe. Was it crashed into the top bar of a lift? Who knows. I doubt I'll be able to learn the previous owner's identity, so he won't be telling me any time soon. I'll probably never know what really happened.

Now for the work. I've taken it to two local body shops who both said the same thing. They won't know the cost until they grind back all the paint and old Bondo to see what they're working with. A repair will be very labor-intensive and probably cost at least $1500. A new roof is $700, so with the labor to install and paint it, I would expect to pay just over $2000. Both shops believe a new roof is the most likely outcome and it seems to me that just asking them to replace the roof and forego any repair of the old one would go farther toward preventing a similar peeling issue again in the future. On the other hand, I rather like the idea of grinding it back in an attempt to learn what really happened, even though it would most likely be fruitless.

Any advice you all can offer would be very much appreciated. They'll probably want to feather the paint into the nearby panels as well, to account for any color variation. Would I be better off forbidding that so they can't mess up the good paint? I'm not sure what to do. It'll never be perfect again, but I would at least like it to look and behave the part...

Cheers.