Nikon Repair of my 24-70 Lens (NOT)

....  as many of you know I killed my Nikon D700 and Nikkor 24-70mm lens a month or two ago while at the races.  I slipped on some (unseen) ice and went down very hard.  The aforementioned hardware went down even harder and basically got banged up pretty bad.  ( the lens was actually snapped in two...  )

Readers digest:  I created a little gallery for visual purposes and had some of the Nikon repair guys look at it to see if they could tell me if it was repairable or just a big heavy paperweight.  They indicated the former (fixable) and recommended that I send it in.  Today I get notification from the repair facility that it CANNOT be (economically) fixed and that it will cost more to fix it than it would be for me to purchase a refurb'd unit.

{sigh}  Feeling like I was led on . . . .   :(  I was give a $650'ish dollar figure to fix.  I'm told a refurb will run me $1400. 

Grrrrrr .....    not entirely happy.

The body is fixable ( I guess ...  I haven't heard any change of mind from them with that - yet ).

{another sigh}

The top of Crow Hill Rd. near Munnsville, NY.

In the meantime -- I grabbed the shot above this morning on my way into work and just quick post processed it on my laptop here at work.  I don't have photoshop installed on this thing but I do have lightroom.  It is an 8 frame pano (handheld / vertical).  I exported the raw files out to .jpg's, and then brought them into the freeware Hugin software to generate the pano.  It's not bad ...  the one propeller on the right hand side didn't line up very well but ...  for not spending any time on it and, again, free software.

I'll likely re-do it, clean it up with photoshop when I get home tonight where I can use layers to fix things if need be.

Nikon D300, Nikkor 35mm lens