Top of Fender Repair, #3

The fender repairs are about 80% done. I'm feeling pretty good about the first readily visible repair I've done to the body.

I had to take a few days off because of family matters, but today I worked for about 3 hours on the fender. I re-made the metal patch panel after Dee and I butchered the curve where the patch meets the hood beyond repair last Wednesday trying to get a good fit. It didn't take very long because I was able to use the old piece of metal as a template. A bit of trimming, and the piece was roughly ready.

I then used some of my cheap-ass Chinese body hammers to form the very slight bends (crowns) that are in this section of the fender panel. Poorly form them, but attempt to form them nonetheless. This exercise served to plainly illustrate the importance of high quality (and a good variety of) hammers and dollies when doing first-class metal forming and repair. Dee loaned me a slapper spoon and some other various hammers, and I think I will expand my collection by a few pieces when I get to doing the nose and tail in a few weeks.

Then I tack-welded the patch in place. At this point, I needed to re-install the hood to make sure the verticle patch of metal around the hood perimeter formed an even gap with the hood, and to indicate to me how far down I needed to grind this metal to be flush with the hood. In other words, fit the corner of the body to the contours of the hood. So I attached the hood and positioned it. The accompanying picture was taken before the hood was properly positioned for proper gaps, but you get the idea.

After installing the hood, I hammered on the vertical piece of patch metal adjacent to the hood to get a nice gap that was even and in line with the rest of the hood perimeter. Then I tacked that piece of metal to the larger fender patch.

I have a tip now for people who are doing good metal work, welding in patch panels, that I haven't seen anywhere else: Make sure the edges of the piece you are welding the patch to (in my case, the remaining fender) are ever so slightly bowed towards the finished surface side. OK, in reality, you probably want things to be totally flat, but whatever you do, try not to have the edge slightly dented in. Why? Because when you position and tack your patch into place, it may be almost perfectly aligned in the proper plane with the part of the car you are fixing, but when you go to finish-grind your welds, you aren't going to get a perfect appearance. Where the weld seam is, you are going to have an ever so slight "V"-shaped depression. Even after grinding, you will still see the weld bead a little bit. If the edges of the patch instead form an ever so slight inverted "V", when you grind the weld down, it will totally disappear. Yes, you will grind a tiny bit of both the patch and the original metal away as well, so realize that the degree of bend I'm talking about should be subtle, almost imperceptible. Practice makes perfect. You will notice I got it right on parts of the patch, but not on others.

After more welding, being careful not to put too much heat in, and grinding, I realized I needed to do some more metal shaping to properly contour the patch. Lots of hammering and dolly-work later, especially near the weld seams, the patch was looking pretty good and "feeling good" when I ran my hand over it. Not done yet, there some more welding and grinding work to do on the inside adjacent to the hood, but it is coming along. The accompanying shows the state of the patch as I left it today, and it will look quite a bit better once primed in the same color as the rest of the body.

The patch is going to require a slight amount of body filler, I'm sure, but I'm not ashamed. No matter what it is better than the crappy fiberglass matt patch that I found after the car was media blasted, which led to more problems than it originally addressed!

Posted by pbrown at July 23, 2004 10:51 PM