Friday, January 13, 2017

Ruining a perfectly good fender...

With the spare tire mount to a point at which an actually tire can be mounted, its time to cut the fender...

I started by drawing an arc 1/2 the diameter of the tire from the center of the mount onto the fender to get the outer profile.  The inner profile was mostly just a guess...


A bit tight, but the shape is correct...



The patch panel was started by first stretching the center with a mallet and a sandbag.


Next, the edges were shrunk using the pullmax and thumnail dies...


It was then smoothed out in the English wheel.


This process was repeated several times until finally it was fairly close to fitting the hole...



At this point, the panel was trimmed and the edges were rolled to fit the contour of the fender.  This was done by hand with a combination of several different hammers and dollies.


 The fender was then marked to the panel and cut so that it could be butt welded in.