Fender repair on a 67 Buick Electra, March 10, 2007.

BW has a replacement fender for his 67 Buick that he picked up for $50. It needs some body work before it can be installed though. He had some rust repair patches welded in, and the guy that welded them in did a pretty good job. The panel warp from the heat of welding the sheet metal is minimal.

We decided to spend our Saturday night working on the rear fender skirt. The front fender skirt is in reasonable shape and it doesn’t need to be perfect since it will be covered in chrome molding.

Now, BW has already taken a stab at the body work, but I think we are still a ways away from completion. There are some high spots that need to be tapped down and we will fill the lows with some bondo. Here you see me taking out some of the frustration I’ve aquired from working on routers and switches during the week.

Doing the body work on this fender was a good test for my new air sander that I picked up at Harbor Freight for $20 about a year ago. It’s a standard body shop style air sander with a 16″ x 3″ flat sanding surface. We cut a 4″ x 36″ sandpaper belt into 2 pieces to get the right size sandpaper. This will put BW’s air compressor to the test as well since air sanders are notorious for being hard on air compressors.

Several beers, an hour or so of sanding later and we are finally ready to slap some bondo on. The old paint and years of wax were difficult to get the glaze off of the fender, even with a 60 grit sandpaper. The job was certainly easier with an air sander though, and beats sanding by hand. The first layer goes on and takes about 40 minutes to cure since it is so cold. It wasn’t really all that cold but bondo doesn’t cure too quickly at 40 some degrees. The flat air sander does a nice job of taking down the high spots and revealing the remaining lows where we will put our second layer of bondo.

The second layer goes on and takes even longer to cure enough to sand. This provides us with a 2-3 beer break and time to bull$#i¥ a while. If I may segway for a moment, apparently BW is secretly yearning to replace himself. Starting discussions about my son brought it out of him after a few Guinness. I think this is the part where the available young altruistic eligible women abandon this article and start scouring the website looking for an email address to track him down and selflessly offer their reproductive parts. Anyway, back to the story…Sanding this coat turns out well and leaves us with a few linguring blemishes in the bondo. We can take care of them with some body glaze.

Overall I’m impressed with how level the fender turned out using the air sander. The 16 inch length works great for sanding without creating the ruts that hand sanding leaves behind. At 12:30AM it’s time to call it quits for the night. Between now and the next automotive day, BW is going to sand down the shine on the paint so we can get a good bite with the primer. There are a few other problems with the fender but we’ll get to those on the next episode of automotive day.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 8:14 am and is filed under Automotive day. The entry is tagged under You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.