Tips on aligning body panels

Looking for some techniques to do final alignment on body panels.

I am fixing up my wife's NB Miata that was totalled out.

It appeared to just need a hood and bumper cover (as far as body panels). The fenders looked completely untouched.

So, now I have a cheapo aftermarket steel hood on the car, and the panel gaps to the fenders are huge - almost half an inch each. So, I thought the hood was just way off dimensionally, but the fenders also are sitting wider than the edges of the headlights, so I think the front fender mount tabs got pushed outward a bit during the impact?

Anyway, I spent a while trying to "coerce" the fenders back into position. But I ended up majorly ovaling out the holes, holding things in position and torquing the bolts. I used the headlights as my reference since they have very little adjustment relative to the unibody. The hood gaps got a lot tighter as well after all this.

So my question is how does a body shop handle this? I am guessing ovaling out the mounting holes is not standard practice? I had little to no luck trying to influence the relative position of the fender line to the mounting holes of the fender.

-Neil

As a guess, your inner fenders are bowed from the accident. The only way to correct this is to do a pull to move them back. If evrything else is lining up ok there is no real harm in doing it the way you did.

If the inner fenders are that far out, how much too wide are the tops of your shock towers?

Yeah, if the inner fenders/strut tops are moved that much then that's gonna suck. But I'm thinking that's not the case.

The fenders and bumper cover mount to brackets on some flimsy hoops that circle the outer part of the headlights. I'm pretty sure those moved when the bumper cover popped off on impact.

Oh well, I'll take a closer look at the dimensions of everything, and see if I'm just in denial!