August 11, 2011

So Thursday was a long day day for me. After dropping one of my kids off at school I got started on some wet sanding on the passenger side. I wasn't all too happy with how it turned out afterwards, so I think painting may be better left alone for now, or at least until I got the entire sub frame dropped and cleaned up all around outside and in. I gave a good friend of mine a call and he agreed to let me borrow his trailer and help me out with welding the new fender piece in. My awesome brother (Thanks Dave!) woke up to help me load her on the trailer and I had to snap a shot of that since I had yet to get a picture of my Nissan truck towing my Nissan toy.



Then I took a shot of it after I backed it into my friends shop that we built.



We started off gauging how we would like to tackle the project, and after a few minutes at looking at the rust damaged spots:



And what I had cut from a previous donor car:



We decided on popping the OEM welds around the fender and donor piece and welding those cut parts in. Here's a shot from that donor piece cut down, as well as the fender piece(less) part we cut off the car. Forgive the fuzziness, all I had for the photo taking was my phone:







Then we prepped by placing clamps where needed to hold in place for the welds:





I didn't catch any of the welding process since we were both heavily involved in maintaining the position of the piece and keeping any flames out. We decided that since these pieces were rather thin metal we wanted to build up the welds real good and then grind them down later on when I started to prep the engine bay for paint. I am very pleased with how well the welding went and turned out. It's not too pretty right now, but after hitting it with the grinder then priming and painting the engine bay, she will look near flawless. When I got the car back to my brother's house I went ahead and hit all exposed metal and welds with a quick shot of rust inhibitor from a spray can since I don't have time just yet to grind her down. It actually seems like it didn't take long to do all this but it was very meticulous work and actually took us right around seven hours to get it right and squared. Also, I'm adding pictures of the passenger side as well as the roof that I painted. Still waiting to drop the back bumper, so don't mind the over spray on it since it's not a full on attempt to paint it just yet. Enjoy.