paint matching from junkyard swap

RatLabGuy

You look like a monkey and smell like one too
Joined
May 18, 2005
Location
Churchville, MD
I just had a DOH! moment and backed into my wife's '10 Mazda5:shaking:.
So I've go to plan a fix pronto!
Front pass door has a nice scratch and very slightly depressed, but looks like simple bodywork recovery.
The sliding rear P-door... not so lucky, it got caught right at the front edge and creased in pretty bad, nice chunk of paint missing too. Not sure if it's at all fixable.

I'm thinking I might just buy a junkyard door, or even both, and swap myself.
Looks like our color (maroon) is rare, but found a few matches via car-part.com. If I didn't care about color, options are wider/cheaper.

Here's what I'm wondering:
1 - If I get one of matching color from a junkyard, what are the chances it actually matches? E.g. no painting?
2 - The front door damage isn't bad but will require a body shop to patch and paint. Looks like a replacement door is ~$350 for matching color. Of course there is my time to switch everything over. I assume a boy shop would be alot more than that to repair it?

If another door won't ever match, or if I'm going to end up w/ somebody painting it anyway, I'm guess I'd be cheaper off just buying any old doors on a deal and paiiyng for a repaint.

Hell then I'd be tempted to repaint the whole car, we always hated the generic-ness of this maroon...
 
That's what I did last year when Momma-san decided to to get all demo-derby at Hanes Mall with the mimi-van... Drivers door was unusable with slight scuff down sliding rear/quarter.

Found a paint code matching front door (100% complete $500), swapped it in & buffed out the rest. Fleabayed what spares/dups I could & ended up at $425.

To date, a dozen people have looked at and can't figure out where it was hit... since we're not talking 20-30 year old paint, you have a 99% of matching code door(s) being undetectable.


we always hated the generic-ness of this maroon...

Uh, WTF did you buy it if you hated it? :flipoff2:
 
That's what I did last year when Momma-san decided to to get all demo-derby at Hanes Mall with the mimi-van... Drivers door was unusable with slight scuff down sliding rear/quarter.
Found a paint code matching front door (100% complete $500), swapped it in & buffed out the rest. Fleabayed what spares/dups I could & ended up at $425.
To date, a dozen people have looked at and can't figure out where it was hit... since we're not talking 20-30 year old paint, you have a 99% of matching code door(s) being undetectable.
Uh, WTF did you buy it if you hated it? :flipoff2:

Wife's car, she chose it. My vote had minimal count. :lol: Really weren't any "better" options, Mazda has trimmed the "cool" colors for the sport models... "if you want this car you get 4 colors to choose from. Suck it up."

It looks like this maroon red must only have been available in '09 and '10, so the bonus there is that any junked car will be about the same vintage and no more than a few years old.
Downside is, rare selection and the price goes up! Doh!
 
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