Front Fender Work

I decided to take a break from the doors and cab and do some work on the from fenders. Since I'm budget building and have the original front fenders I have decided to fix and use them. Taking a good look at them I found the usual dents and dings, some stress cracks, mounting hole damage, previous repairs and problems caused just from sitting around.

This kind of damage is pretty common and pretty easy to take of. The damage on the right will take a little more work.

I decided to I needed to fix some of these holes first so that I could mount the fenders to the truck. Some of the areas I will need to work on will require they be mounted so that everything fits when finished. Working a long time on something only to find out is does not fit can ruin your day, make sure it fits first!

The holes with the light damage are fixed first along with the stress cracks on the inner fender. The larger damage with the missing sheet metal around it will be fixed after the fender is mounted and held in place.

I will not be running bumpers on my '37 so these slots for the bumper brackets will need to be filled in. This is one area I wanted to be sure everything was mounted in place before starting. The fenders have been sitting around for many years causing some damage in this area. The weight of the fenders, and or things stacked on top of them, have deformed the area between the opening and mounting location to the grille shell. Both fenders have this problem and everything needs to be mounted and worked together to get them to align.

Have I mentioned not to throw things away until your sure you do not need them, just a reminder. I found I needed to mount the radiator in place before I could bolt in the grille shell so I had to dig out the radiator. Of course I have the fenders bolted in place already, remember to put the radiator in first next time!

At this point I tried to install the grill shell. It sounded easy, looked to be easy enough but turned out to be a handful. Since this was all apart when I got the truck I needed a little trial and error to get the grille shell on. Bolting the grille to the fenders is straight forward but I didn't realize the inner fenders also bolted to the grille. I also found that the grille bolts to the radiator about half way up on the sides. Of course the brackets are all rusted on the grille and part of it was missing on one side. Ok, I have all the mounting points figured out so lets drop the grill over the fill neck and bolt it up. Yea right. The lower part of my grille shell looked to be a couple inches to wide to fit between my fenders. Mental note number two, put the grille shell on after installing the radiator. After backing the fender mounting bolts off and some squeezing and prying I had the grille in place.

Now that I have everything is in place I can start to work things around to fit like it was meant to. As you can see I had some problems between the grille shell and the openings for the bumper brackets. Both sides have the same type of problem. The sheet metal has bent and was distorted between the inner fender and the top inner corner of the opening. After a bunch of pushing, pulling and hammering I was finally able to get things to align properly. Once it was aligned I bolted everything in place. If I removed everything now to work on it things would most likely get out of shape again.
I know I need to remove the fenders to properly fix this whole area and work out some high and low spots. I decided to go ahead and weld in a filler panel in the bumper bracket openings. One thing I noticed in his area was the rolled edge on the bottom of the fender turned up and disappeared around the opening. I planned on some small turn signal lights here but I do not have them yet. If I run the little rectangle lights then the turned up body lines could add a little accent to them. The problem is I don't really like those lights. I could cut out this section and build a new rolled section to match the rest of the fender but that is a little more work than I want to do at the moment. I decided to fill it in and leave the original lines and look for a light that will fit this area with a little more style than the little rectangles. At least the filled in area added some strength to this area so that when I remove the fender it will hold its shape.

Well, this is the point that I found a new potential problem. I went to get something out from inside the cab and noticed the rear part of the fender moving down. What the heck? I stood back and noticed the door hitting the fender when it was opened past a certain point. Just great, all that trimming I did to get the doors to open just a little bit farther turns out to be for nothing. If anybody has been wondering why I haven't been doing any finish body work here is one of the reasons. Usually something needs modified later down the road. In this case I'll be going back into the hinge openings and adding a little metal back in. I was leaning towards this anyway so that I had plenty of room for weatherstripping. I have also been tossing around ideas for a check strap to keep the door opening to far, now it will just need to be a little shorter.

This is the reason my drivers side door had the damage it had, swung open and hit the fender. Now it would just hit in a different place. I'll have to admit this problem did not cross my mind. In the end all it means is my doors will not open as far as I wanted them to but will still open far enough that there is no problem getting in or out. The price you have to pay to look good.

I'll fix door problem later, back to the fenders. There has been some previous repairs done at the top of the wheel openings and I want to see how bad this area is. There was a lot of putty here and a big crack in the putty letting me know there needs to be a new repair here. From the inside of the fender I could see a few welds from the fender lip up into the fender. Out came the grinder and away went the putty in a cloud of dust. At first it didn't look to bad, a small crack from the lip up into the fender for a few inches. The worst looked to be the mess on the rolled edge, ouch. Well lets hammer things back into shape and see what we have then. I hammer down high spots, hammered up the low ones and my crack keep getting bigger and bigger. I found three vertical welds and a couple horizontal ones. Some of the thinner sheet metal gave may to my beating along with the center weld.

Well the good news was it didn't need all that putty, the bad news is that it needs some new sheet metal to totally replace this thin and weak section. Honestly I'm not sure how I want to handle this job yet. I would like to find a junk fender that has a section I could cut out to use as a patch. Make that tow patches as I'm sure the other side will be the same way. Most likely I'll need to build my own patch.

Some days things just work, others start to make you wonder why. It will all be worth it in the end. I hope.