The right front fender that I have done bodywork on, and planned on using just isn’t the best part to use. It was so wadded up (see the post titled Right Front Fender …. Savable?). With some advice from a friend, and lots of experimentation and effort, the fender was actually looking real good. Saved I thought! But, I ran into difficulties with the top crown of the fender when trying to get the hood to sit flush with it. I had already tweeked the top surface of the fender and had more body filler in it than I’d care to admit, so when I found a good fender (actually a front clip minus hood) in the swap meet area at the Spokane Goodguys 2010 car show, I figured I’d better just take a loss on all that labor that I put into that Biscayne fender. The advantages being far less body filler, more confidence that the overall contours of the fender are accurate, better fit, and it already has the impala trim holes since it came from an Impala, not a Biscayne or Bel Air.
The fender is not perfect however… it was attached to the front clip as an assembly and had been moved around that way, which stressed the area of the fender where it mounts to the core support… bent would be more accurate actually. Anyway, the damaged area is rather stout, being doubled-up sheets of steel so hammering it back out was difficult and It will require some filler along the top edge, but not too bad. Other than that, this fender is real cherry!
I stripped the paint off, hammer/dollied out a few dings and minor scrapes, then flipped the fender over to scrape off all the old undercoating and crud. The bottom side was then treated with Picklex 20 to convert the surface rust. Next I’ll paint the bottom side with Zero Rust matte black and prime the front side with PPG DPLF Epoxy primer.
