It would seem I’m getting a bit behind on updating this here ‘ol thread. Which is odd, because I rarely get the work done faster than I can post about it.
So here goes:
Once the outer face of the fender was in finished body work, I turned my attention to the inside just like last year. I knew the inside of this fender was in pretty rough shape, but I wasn’t expecting it to be quite this bad, or even worse than the passenger’s side.
Here’s what I had to work with:
The first order of business was to compare the factory holes in the other fender to the ones in this one, and mark all the rest for elimination. Because symmetry.
These holes were for the factory cruise control transducer, which quickly went away when I did the engine swap. Why? Because this is a street cruiser and cruise will rarely get used, plus it was uglier than a mud fence. Enough reasons for me.
The metal fusing glue gun made short work of the holes:
Ground ‘em down and metal finished them out:
Just to be on the safe side and to ensure the repaired area was nice and flat, next I profiled the area, skimmed it with some putty, and blocked it out.
While I was at it, I skimmed the backside of the marker light patch, and smoothed it out as well. No need for perfection here, I just need it to be smooth and invisible once it’s painted.
With that little bit of filler work done and outta the way, it was onto getting the rest cleaned up and ready to go. There’s a lot of bare metal here in these next few pics, but it was honestly the easiest way to go about it: Start from (almost) scratch:
It doesn’t look like it, but there was an absolutely obscene amount of effort that went into addressing all this stuff. The rusty areas, smoothing edges, feathering out old paint, and scuffing everything in sight.
One particularly concerning thing I found was some very well advanced rust on the backside of the inner fender lip. It was only visible with an inspection mirror, and that’s what I needed to see to remove it too.
Think grinding is easy? Try doing it through a mirror where your depth perception is off, and everything’s backwards!!
Not fun.
All the grinding in this area was done with a trouble light and the edge of a cutoff wheel, because that’s the only thing that would fit in there. The rust was so advanced that I estimate if I hadn’t caught it at this stage, it would’ve only been a year or two before it rusted through to the outside.
Once I was confident that I had removed 99% of the corrosion, it was time to treat all the inaccessible areas and seams with rust converter:
No pics, but once the converter had cured, it was back to scuffing and sanding the excess off until everything was ready. And yes, I made especially sure that the areas on the backside of that inner lip got a VERY liberal coating with the converter.
It was at this point that both sides were now ready for paint and primer. On the weekend, I got the shop and the fender set up to spray, the working quarters are as tight as ever.
Same recipe as always, two medium-wet coats of epoxy (shown in white here)...
...followed by four heavy wet coats of high build primer-surfacer. Looks pretty good, it’s always nice to see things go back to one uniform color again.
I’m ready to flip the fender over and get some color on the inside now that the outside is primed, but there’s a few fasteners that need to be painted at the same time. So with that being said, I stayed after work a bit tonight and did some sandblasting in the shop’s blast cabinet.
After separating the stuff that needs to be white from the stuff that needs to be black, I set the black stuff up and painted it tonight.
Undersidesfirst...
... then the topsides:
This is the stuff that needs to be painted white.
But unfortunately I found a couple more bolts that need to go white as well. So no shooting color tonight unfortunately. I’ll blast those last couple after work again tomorrow, then maybe I can get some color on the remaining fasteners and the inside of the fender after dinner.
Thats it for now gents, until the next one!
Thanks for looking in on the progress.
D.
www.summitracing.com
