I posted this in the general section as well, but thought there might be better visibility to it here.

The turn signal bar on my wife's 1988 Heritage Softail decided to loose one of it's attachment bolts while we were out riding this weekend. Unfortunatly, we didn't notice it right away, and so the bar sat crooked against the rear fender and from vibration and moving around, it wore a "groove" about 1/2" x 1.25" long into the paint, and to the bare metal on one side and chewed up the area directly around the mounting pad on the other side.

When I took the bar off to fix it, I broke the remaining bolt. I looked at the bolt, and I think the root cause of this was the previous owner. The bolt was a serrated washer head type, with an external star lock washer under that. I don't think that would be used by HD, so I replaced the bolts with stainless allen heads, a split lockwasher, and blue Loctite.

So, here are my questions:

1. Is this common?
I've added the hardware on the rear fender to the "critical" fastener check I do; just wondered if this happens to others as well.

2. The bike has the Burgandy/Candy Red two tone paint; can a paint shop redo just the damaged area and blend it in, or are they going to need to redo the whole fender?

3. Is the fender available as a pre-painted replacement from H-D? I called my parts guy, but the catalog didn't seem to go back that far.

4. What year range are the fenders interchangable? There was one on Ebay, right color but from a 2007; so I didn't know if it would fit.

If anyone else has had to do this, what option did you choose, and what was the ballpark cost to repair?