VCCA Home Forums TECHNICAL - 1945 AND NEWER 1946-1948 Need some MAJOR advice......

Ok...Here we go, Im getting ready to put the front clip back on the 47. The orig. front fenders are straight,but have those darn little rust out holes at the usual botton part of the fenders. I purchased a parts car 48 last year for the engine, but got to take the whole car for the same $120.00. (the most incredible steal of a lifetime 72,000 orig. miles) The fenders are Imaculate all sanded, and in black primer, not a whole, dent or speck of rust anywhere!!! Problem is they have the holes for the fleetline chrome mouldings. My fleetmaster doesnt have them. How do I fill in the holes??? or should I just repair the orig. ones???? Be a shame not to use these fenders. They are REALLY in Mint condition!!!

Thanks, Fleet

A good sheet metal man (woman) could weld them in and sand them down to the point you'd never know they were there. Or, in keeping with the vintage, they could be leaded in but I wouldn't really recommend it unless there were absolutely no other option. Suggesting Bondo would probably get me banned, stoned, folded, spindled and mutilated and rightly so, so I won't even go there. I'm chipping bondo off my frame where holes were filled and and the rot next to the door was "rebuilt". NOT a happy camper. But it'll feel so good when I'm done.

I would also vote for having the moulding holes correctly filled--unless the rust holes in the originals are very small.There is no substitute for solid metal.The rust may be worse than you think.

Agreed.

OK, I too would like to use the good fleetline fenders, as gene says theres no replaceing good solid metal. Now I want to do this my self. What would be a good procedure for filling these holes in? Im a good welder, but these are small holes!! Afraid to warp the the surrounding metal with a ARC welder. Suggestions?????


Thank you all!!!

Sarge

The best solution is to fill them in by hammer welding. This is done with a gas unit and a small tip. It requires quick heat, fast hammering, and quick squelch. Not a procedure for the novice.

I would reccomend useing a wire feed welder preferrable with MIG rather than core flux wire, there are copper pieces made to back up the other side of the hole so that the molten metal won't drip, It is not the easiest thing to do, welding up a drilled hole in sheet metal. you should get a piece of the same gauge metal, drill some holes in it and practice on it before doing the expensive fenders, or you could take the fenders to a good sheet metal body man and get them welded up. The gas welding process discribed by Raymundo is acceptable but it is also very old technolology, only us old codgers use it anymore. I prefer it myself, I use a Dillon 2000 torch that is often demonstrated at swap meets. It is no longer sold as a Dillon, Dillon sold out to some other company.The new company markets the torch as a Henrod 2000, their website is:
http://www.cut-like-plasma.com/dillon_torch.htm

P.S. I don't use my Dillon torch for cutting, I have a 50 year old small Torchweld by NCG torch for that, The Dillon does a good job but I don't like to use it for cutting.

From my (admittedly limited) experience, if you are dead set on doing this yourself, I vote with Ray. With gas welding you can really control the amount and location of heat. The MIG process adds a lot of heat, regardless of how the shielding gas is added (external gas supply or flux core). I've read that heli-arc (TIG) is the preferred process because you have the ability to use low heat and keep it localized. Problem is that this equipment is not likely available to you if you want to do-it-yourself.

If you do try this yourself, don't try to fill in the holes with filler rod alone, tack on a piece of similar gauge metal from behind then weld / hammer and grind.

I had a '69 Camaro that I did extensive repairs to the rear quarters, inner fenders and trunk on (more than) a few years back. I found that even small amounts of rust perforation had very large amounts of corrosion behind them. The surrounding rusted metal burned away as I got the area hot enough to weld. I wound up cutting the metal back much further than I wanted to. I used an old 110 volt "American Beauty" wire feed MIG with Argon (I think). It was easy to learn, just set the wire feed speed where you want it, hold the gun over some test metal and pull the trigger, then adjust the current until you get "that frying egg sound". I warped the living daylights out of everything I "repaired". I ended up with a lot of new metal, covered with a lot of plastic body putty and undercoat.

Based on this experience, I'm probably going to have someone else weld the lower cowl corners of my '37 pickup...