My Explorer is totalled

[Rhett]

Did your 97 drive ok still? i.e. no frame damage? You could have kept it then. 2nd gen are (in my opinion) the last of the true trucklike explorers, so any that can be saved by us, should be saved. But oh well. Good luck in your search for another one.

 

[lobo411]

This exact thing happened to me, except in my case a drunk driver slammed into my rear end while the truck was parked on the street in the middle of the night. Pushed my X 20 feet up the street and into 2 more parked cars.

The rear bumper was turned up, so I had to take a sledge and a few solid pieces of steel and pound the bumper mounting points back into a bracket shape. I also bought a hydraulic puller from Harbor Freight for $99 and used that to pull the splayed-out frame back into shape/alignment.

I bought a new aftermarket bumper on Rockauto for a few hundred.

Aside from a new front valance (which was destroyed when my truck hit the cars parked ahead of me), that was the only real damage. I profited $3000. It really wasn't very hard to fix...this was my first time ever doing any kind of body work and it was quite easy. My elderly father was still around then, though, to tell me how to do things.

 

[RandomNerd2000]

Rhett's attitude is part of why I haven't sold my 01, it's far from "solid" in the aspect of I'm constantly fixing it, but I'm not intent on parting with it immediately, or my 99 V8 wreck, both are gonna be clean examples of 2nd gens, even if I get something newer, I'm still gonna hang on to at least the V8.