Leica M3 top plate repair / replace: anyone have experience with this?

Thanks to everyone for the detailed and informative responses. I'll have to give it some more thought. I don't want to undertake a delicate repair and find out I've gotten in way over my head.
 
Doug said:
Have a good relationship with your local auto body shop guys? The replacement top cover I got on eBay for the dented MX mentioned above... itself had a dent in the pentaprism area, an easier spot to fix, no corners.

I took it to my dent-fixer (to whom I'd given way too much business) and he used his skills to pound out the irregularity and spray it with matching semi-gloss black enamel. Looked like new, no charge!

This may be a possibility for you to look into...
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You know, this thought actually crossed my mind: smoothing out a ding in a camera body is not that much different from the essentials of autobody work. The brass alloy is not common to car bodies, but I would imagine that the techniques of smoothing out imperfections would be an easy task for a well-seasoned autobody tech.

My neighbour across the street runs a local autobody shop -- perhaps I should stop by his house and see what he says? :)
 
I saw an interesting episode of the British car series "For the Love of Cars" recently in which they restored a DeLorean. DeLoreans as you may know have a stainless steel body so fixing dings in them is more like the problems faced by anyone tackling a Leica top plate. It was interesting to see how the technician did this in this case. He held a small u shaped tool against the outside of the panel (so the "u" surrounded the ding) and hammered it from the inside forcing the metal back into alignment. After completing the metal bending the stainless steel panel was re polished. This latter bit, unfortunately we cannot do with a Leica top plate because of its plating. Any dent removal is almost certain to leave some evidence of the mishap unless the camera is then painted black.
 
peterm1 said:
Any dent removal is almost certain to leave some evidence of the mishap unless the camera is then painted black.
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Very correct! The dent is so small that I would leave it as it is. When I was repairing bigger dents on chromed cover firstly I got chrome and nickel beneath removed by a specialist, then I corrected the dent, polished the whole top cover, not only the place where the dent was and gave it back to specialist who satinized the surface and then applied nickel and chrome. This is the only way how to get top cover without any signs of previous dent.
 
I dropped my black M2 and it got a pretty good ding on the edge. It bothered me like crazy for a while. A Leica dealer I know just called it 'a little kiss.' I just used the camera and after a while it stopped bothering me. In time I did not even notice it anymore.
 
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