On Monday February 20, 2006 I will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the day I picked up my new 1981 RX7 from Wantagh Mazda in Wantagh, NY. It's a Maya Gold 5-speed GS with air conditioning the only option. It's gone 60,000 miles, hardly seen rain, and got caught out in the snow only once that I can remember. It's all factory stock and original except for a radio upgrade and aftermarket wheels and tires. I have the original radio and steel wheels. I have every piece of documentation including the window sticker which I've preserved in a folder. The car has been garaged its entire life, and although it's been off the road since 1996, it's been run every month or so to keep it alive.

I was always a fanatic about the car physically. The interior is 99% as new. For it's 25th birthday I decided to do a good cosmetic cleanup to remove the general dullness that resulted from 10 years of sitting around garages, so I spent several days and many hours with various Meguiar's products on the car. I would say the paint and exterior trimwork are now back to at least 95% of new except for 3 unfortunate areas. There is a small dent on top of the right front fender where my dad knocked a bottle of insecticide off a shelf in the garage about 20 years ago (he never admitted it, but I'm sure he felt too bad about it to admit it). There is a small but obvious dent in the right front door, I believe from my neighbor's landscaper when I left the car in the driveway one afternoon. And the paint on the top of both bumper covers (above the black) has dulled beyond saving. About 15 years ago Dent-X tried getting the fender dent out (the paint surface was unbroken), but the paint began to crack and they had stop about halfway through.

I've described the car's condition and history to give a sense of what it is and what it means to me so I can now ask some questions. I plan on registering it and bringing it around to local car shows, Friday cruise nights, etc., but I want it to be really presentable before I do. Therefore I want to get the two dented areas repaired and the tops of the bumpers repainted. I showed the car to my friend Steve who owns a body place. Steve has worked on several of my and my neighbors' cars and does very nice work on street and show cars. He says it will be very difficult to match the look of the paint they were using 25 years ago, and that even if I asked him to try, he won't do it because he can't guarantee I'll be happy with the results. He told me the right way to try to do it might be to repaint the whole right side of the car, which I don't want to do because originality is what this car is all about.

My questions are, #1, whether it is at all possible to repair this damage in an acceptably unnoticeable way with just local painting, #2, maybe reshooting much of the car is not such a bad thing if the results justify it, and #3, can anyone recommend the right person in the metro NY area (I live in the middle of Nassau County on Long Island, NY) to help me decide what to do and to do this work? It must be done correctly or I don't want to have it done at all. Thanks.