It's been a long, long, and I stress long, time since I did anything worthwhile on my Barracuda. Somehow, the garage just filled up with crap and the car wasn't that accessible. Well, in the last 2 months, the garage has undergone quite the renovation, as some of you may have seen in another thread. WEll, I recently got back to working on my car. I had to buy 2 different inner fenders(driver's side). The first one had a lot of surface rust, and, once blasted, had some area that were just too thin for my liking. I found another one, and started fitting it a few weeks ago, and it was nowhere near close. I sat down and tried and tried to make it fit, to no avail. Well, I worked on it for ~3hrs 2 weeks ago, and was so frustrated and mad, I had to walk away right then, or I would have thrown the damned thing on the floor and started jumping all over it, and then it would NEVER fit.
2 days later, I went into the garage, clear mind, and sat down with both of the potential replacements on the work bench, along with tape measure in hand. While the one with paper thin area fit quite good, I knew it wasn't my choice to use. Is tarted measuring different areas, and it soon became apparent this thin had been kind of flattened, maybe in shipping they shipped it with something heavy on top of it, I don't know.
Well many hours later, and with much tinkering, I finally got the thing on the car today, well, temporary mounting. It's screwed down, and my next trip to the garage(one night this week) will see me firing up the welder and permanently attaching the inner fender. After that, it will be grinding the plug welds smooth, little bit of putty here and there, some sanding, and, off to some new area of the car. I wwant to get all the area that need some wedling done done before the end of fall, and would love to get the car off of the rotisserie befor ethe new year, but, I think, realistically, with all of the suspension parts that are going to get blasted and powder coated, I might have to hit powerball to achieve that goal, I think late spring is more doable.
I haven't figured out how to caption pictures on here, I've tried and tried, to no avail, so.. the inner fender I used , the shock hole was pretty banged up. I spent quite some time with body hammers and dollies, trying to coax it back to looking decent, but not needing too much putty, in the process. Well, I was having a helluva time, and then, last night, I was watching an old episode of "Overhauling", and they were "shrinking" metal (had been stretched by beating on it too much) by heating it up, then hitting it with a cold wet rag, bingo, the light went off in my head, I'll give that a shot.
I went out, after making a posting on what to do in the "Body" threads, and got out the propane torch, heating the pi$$ out of an n area, and hit it with a rag soaked in ice water, wow, what results. I was able to get it decent enough, and then massage it some more with the hammer and dollies, that it will take barely a fine skim coat of putty to filling the little waves.
here are pics of the bad shock hole, the repaired shock hole, and the inner fender, mounted, screwed down, and waiting for this guy to get his fat a$$ out there and weld.
Later
FF