Hit a deer? Fix it for less than your deductible

Step 1:

Watch the video.

Step 2:

Take the cross-member off, and you can definitely see it's dinged up and bent. And the condenser. It has not broken a hole in it. So I'm going to go ahead and take 2x4's and clamps, and go ahead and start to pull it back in.

Step 3:

Here's a new cross-member from the junkyard. Now I'll get creative with this and will start to stretch the parts of the car back into shape. Then retract it so the holes will line up. OK, now when this thing retracts back the bolt just lines right up.

Step 4:

So go ahead and put that in and i’m going to start getting the new hood put back on. Wow, does that look a lot better! It matches and was not really that expensive. So you can see now that the hood is starting to go together.

Step 5:

Now we're going to start getting the headlights put on. So we'll get this rivet out of the way. Start to pull back some of this the plastic portion to gain access to the lower bumper. You take off the bolt and it basically just snaps right off pretty easily once you get that bolt out of there. So we can start to get those old broken headlight pieces and start to straighten up the frame and get it ready for the headlight. Check these out...brand new headlights and they weren’t that expensive... 40 bucks a piece. They even came with the lightbulbs in them. Now that's incredible! So let's go ahead and start to put them in and get the bulbs all in position and get everything lined up.

Step 6:

And while it's opened up you can even clean the light bulbs and make sure they're all good to go. And there it goes. It fits right into place and then we'll start to bolt them. It is sure nice to have the little pieces ready to go. And we'll bolt the top one in. It's starting to look like a car again. Let's go ahead and snap the bumper back and it goes right into place.

Step 7:

OK, now we're going to start to put the lower part of the bumper back into place, bolt it in and then start to work the plastic back in. Then we're going to put the rivet back in. And that's pretty much what it takes.

Step 8:

Now we're going to go ahead and get the other light bulb in. It's having a little bit of the alignment problem. I can kind of see by feeling both of them and looking at the spacing so we're going to go back with the Porta Power and start to do some fine adjustments because this whole thing needs to come forward in order to make this bolt line up.

Step 9:

So here we go... let's crank it out. You will see it move. Bring it a little bit further than you feel like you should and then when it retracts back in, the hole is going to line up so let's see how this goes. It looks like we're all lined and ready to go. So I'm going to go ahead give it a little bit of a flex and put the bolt back in. And there it is. OK, now that we've got them both, it's time to pull off that plastic and expose those brand new headlights.

Step 10:

Now it's really starting to look like it used to. Now my dad gets his car back! That's going to be great. So we'll close the hood and now we're just going to test the lights and just make sure that everything's in good shape. There we go... those lights work... those guys work... excellent! It looks like we're good to go.