So I decided to have a go at repairing the original fender. As I had feared, stripping the paint and thick bondo revealed crude repair of collision damage. Most of the damage was at the nose of the fender, but there was a substantial bulge in the lower rear panel just aft of the wheel arch.
Forgot to mention, the inner structure was remarkably free of rust, with the original primer mostly intact.
After a few hours of hammer work I got the nose section approximately back to where it belonged. Some cracks and holes from the old body repairs would then need welding.
The radio antenna hole was bent up in the area, and while straightening it, I just decided to close it off completely.
After many hours (days) of hammer and dolly, heat shrinking, and welding, I got most of the bulge worked out of the lower panel and the wheel arch mostly corrected.
Got some Dyna-Glass filler on the fender. But still not satisfied with the lower panel. It still curves outward a tiny bit more than it should. No amount of shrinking seems to be able to draw that excess outward curve back in. And with all the shrinking work that I've already done, there's still a wave in the panel that's taking more filler than I'd prefer. The nose section I think I could live with.
But then there are other issues. All the under-bonnet front sheet metal ahead of the radiator is damaged to a degree. It was crudely hammered out in the old repairs. Besides looking ugly when you open the bonnet, it's interfering with getting the correct alignment of the body panels that I'm repairing. In addition to the lower fender panel being misshapen, it has also been attacked by the tin worm at its lower extremity. From the outside it looks good, but there were a couple of rust pinholes that I welded up, and a larger deeply pitted area where the chance of ongoing rust-through is a concern.
No comments:
Post a Comment