That little crack being considered non-repairable by welding is BS to me. I could understand GM not wanting just any shop to do it, but the fact that they consider something that small to be totally un-repairable in their eyes is shocking.
GM is pretty tired of getting sued for "unsafe cars". So it's not surprising that they error on the side of caution.
Caution also means that it's likely that there are cracks you can't see, nor can get to.
Basically, this car becomes very similar to a car where the front is from A and the rear is from B and it's welded together. Few insurance companies would be very happy covering that car.
Also, it is aluminum, so it's a bit different than welding a steel car back together. The heat treat implications of welding aluminum might be considerable, especially for a part like the frame rails which might not actually have any welds on them in the first place (only rivets and glue).
It looks as if whatever the car hit also peeled a bit of the aluminum off that protrusion. In a stressed area where the rear suspension attaches. Welding the crack may not be all it needs.
I agree with not fixing it from GM stand point.
MadScientistMatt said:It looks as if whatever the car hit also peeled a bit of the aluminum off that protrusion. In a stressed area where the rear suspension attaches. Welding the crack may not be all it needs.
Good point. The fix might involve adding a little metal. Kinda like airplane fixes where structural repairs tend to add a little weight.
So how much is it going to go for at auction and be put back on the road with $0 in repairs?
i'd go the John Welsh route with that salvage title and drive it right to the inspection for a "rebuilt" one with no effort, and if i was feeling bored get it on a lift and tig the crack
Patrick said:So how much is it going to go for at auction and be put back on the road with $0 in repairs?
i'd go the John Welsh route with that salvage title and drive it right to the inspection for a "rebuilt" one with no effort, and if i was feeling bored get it on a lift and tig the crack
The aviation industry would solve this problem with a carefully shaped, well placed doubler plate and a berkload of rivets.
I guess Corvette frames are harder to find that Toyota pickup ones.
I'd weld that sucker up and go, but I do understand GM's problem with it. There is no out-of-pocket for them doing it this way, no future liability. Let the insurance company deal with it.
Reading that story reminds me of the conversations on VW Vortex in about 1999 about VR6s losing oil pans. One guy cracked his after punching a big chunk of ice - and his post had this exact same sort of tone. The quote I remember was (paraphrased):
"I can't believe I lost an engine by hitting a piece of frozen water!"
"Dude, frozen water sunk the Titanic..."
I can kinda understand why GM wouldn't want to fix it, but at the same time, think about the story of how it happened. That's not exactly a "so far out there nobody else will ever have this problem" kind of thing... At some point, someone else is going to crack that frame.
So IMO, there should be some kind of procedure for repairing it if the damage isn't catastrophic. To properly check it over for further cracking and fix the crack well wouldn't be cheap, but I'm sure it would be a heck of a lot cheaper than totalling out a year old Vette...
I'll bet you need to basically disassemble the front end of the car to properly fix/inspect that. Lots and lots of labor. We also only have one side of what actually happened, and of course the driver/owner will not be the most impartial of sources. Maybe he actually took a railroad track at 105 mph and this is from grounding out the landing.
Someone will buy the wreck and will either get an awesome deal or will discover that GM knows a lot more about Corvettes than he does.
I find myself supporting GM in this case. This isn't GM's problem. It's the insurance company's problem.
Woody said:I find myself supporting GM in this case. This isn't GM's problem. It's the insurance company's problem.
It's the insurance company's problem to figure out what to do. But it's GM's problem that they basically said "you can't fix that, we won't honor the warranty if you try"
Patrick said:So how much is it going to go for at auction and be put back on the road with $0 in repairs?
i'd go the John Welsh route with that salvage title and drive it right to the inspection for a "rebuilt" one with no effort, and if i was feeling bored get it on a lift and tig the crack
That's what I was thinking too.
rslifkin said:Woody said:I find myself supporting GM in this case. This isn't GM's problem. It's the insurance company's problem.
It's the insurance company's problem to figure out what to do. But it's GM's problem that they basically said "you can't fix that, we won't honor the warranty if you try"
WRT insurance, IMHO, GM's statement goes deeper than that- it's more like "if you fix it, we won't stand behind the safety of the repair" which means that IF an insurance company pays for the repair- they are on the hook for any crash loss that is abnormal after it, instead of GM.
To me, it seems like a scary prospect for an insurance company to put them into a position where they could be considered liable for a death. Even if the death can't be directly linked to this damage later- the fact that they ignored the manufacturer to rebuild the car, the odds of them being far more liable is quite likely.
At this point, for the insurance company to protect themselves, I would bet they crush the car.
Keith Tanner said:I'll bet you need to basically disassemble the front end of the car to properly fix/inspect that. Lots and lots of labor. We also only have one side of what actually happened, and of course the driver/owner will not be the most impartial of sources. Maybe he actually took a railroad track at 105 mph and this is from grounding out the landing.
Someone will buy the wreck and will either get an awesome deal or will discover that GM knows a lot more about Corvettes than he does.
If gm's knowledge about corvettes is anything like their trucks, I got this
Aluminum doesn't have an elastic bending mode like steel. In steel you can bend to a certain point and the material will spring back with no changes to the internal structure of the material. With aluminum and titanium every bend pins interstitial point defects and work hardens the material. The Russians found that out when they built submarines out of titanium; every dive they made was one of a finite number of dives the boat was going to be able to make before catastrophic failure.
If that aluminum part could be removed, welded, straightened, heat normalzed and crack inspected before reinstallation it might be as good as new. Anything less than that it is a gamble on what is going on internally and no one who could be on the hook for that is going to take the bet.
Here it is. No idea if it'll go up for auction:
https://www.iaai.com/Vehicle?itemID=25910048&RowNumber=0&loadRecent=True
In reply to oldopelguy :
That's why you end up adding metal to fix it (such as plating over the area with a doubler) rather than just filling in the crack with some weld.
You'll need to log in to post.
