TheSamba.com :: View topic

Thu Jan 23, 2014 10:09 pm

To bad your not closer....I have 2 perfect doors from a 76, that I'm no gunna use on anything.

Sat Jan 25, 2014 10:17 am

Nice build so far. You are on a role. Seeing your build has given me some ideas for my 74 Super. What area of Eastern Washington are you in? I am near Boise. Good to see some Super love in the area.

Your pic inside Bow Wow was a shock at first. Hopefully you found what you needed from them. I gave up going there about a year ago. It used to be a great store, the people who run/own it now either don't have a lot of knowledge about ACVW's or they just don't care.

Keep up the good work, I am looking forward to your forward progress.

Sun Feb 02, 2014 9:36 pm

Walking Contradiction> Don't feel bad about using Bondo . . . As long as it is never applied more than 1/8'' thick
That is certainly my goal to keep it (much) less than 1/8" :)
Chanbob> Nice build so far
Thanks for the kind words.
Chanbob> What area of Eastern Washington are you in?
A bit south of Spokane.
Chanbob> Your pic inside Bow Wow was a shock
A pilgrimage I had to make. Looked pretty much like the last time I was there in 1980 :)

As detailed long ago (in "Making Gas Door Release Inside Again"), we put a latch on the gas door, so we would not have to mess with locking gas caps. Bashr52 asked "Are you going to fill in the indent in the body for the old style door?" At the time, I thought I would leave it to the body shop, but We are getting a bit braver so I thought I would give it a shot on my own.

We started with some spare bod metal shaped to fit the opening:

Bent that so it filled the notch:

Used some tape to hold it in place and tack welded:

Then made several short welds to complete it, allowing full cooling between:

We used the carbide burr in an air powered die grinder to smoothe the welds out:

Here is the first pass on the bondo. I am a bit surprised how far the bondo goes beyond the weld until it feathers. I guess that the welding must have warped things down a bit, despite my attempts to keep things cool. I used a long block sanding block to make sure I followed the plane of the panel. The center of the sanded bondo is still a little low:

A quick test fit with the gas flap:

And a final picture after the second shot of bondo is sanded smooth:

Nice way to spend a couple of hours in the warm shop on a cold Saturday.

Sun Feb 09, 2014 9:26 pm

It has been quite a learning experience on making these fenders wider (Skip back to here to see the start of the fender widening). We have done a few things right the first time. Mostly, however we get things right after several tries. Lots of pounding, grinding, etc. Lots of doing things slow that should be fast.

We finally got the filler close enough to brave showing it to the body shop who will do the final painting. He said "it was better than he expected". He gave us a bunch more tips and strategies and back we went for more work on the fenders. More blocking, "pecking" at the highs spots, skim coats, sanding, blocking . . . here are the results:

Today we went ahead and shot the fenders with the 2K epoxy primer to cover the bare metal and seal the filler. There are some small flaws, but the magic of the camera hides most of that:

We then shot over the 2K epoxy primer with some sandable primer. Next will be a guide coat and more blocking.

Sun Feb 09, 2014 9:57 pm

http://www.amazon.com/3M-05861-Guide-Cartridge-Applicator/dp/B000PENEMM
buy this and use it , it will spoil ya on mud work and primer blocking :)
fabricator john

Tue Feb 11, 2014 11:40 pm

fabricator john wrote: http://www.amazon.com/3M-05861-Guide-Cartridge-Applicator/dp/B000PENEMM
buy this and use it , it will spoil ya on mud work and primer blocking :)
That looks pretty cool. After I run out of the spray can of guide coat, I'll look at getting one of those.

Fresh off the relative success of the front fender widening project, we decided to tackle the rear fenders. The front fenders meet the body at nearly a 90 degree angle along most of their length so moving them outward was relatively simple. In contrast, the rear fenders meet the body at a pretty good slope along much of their length.

After quite a bit of head scratching, we have the fenders marked for cutting like this:

The inside of the tape will be the outer fender cut line, the outside of the tape will be the inner fender cut line:

The bumper hole will be entirely on the inner fender, so that geometry will not get messed up. The tail lights will move out and be entirely on the outer fender.

We duplicated the marking on a total of four fenders:

The right fender is in pretty bad shape, and as we left the shop, I noticed we have another right fender in better shape, so we will probably end up marking one more.

Wed Feb 12, 2014 9:52 am

Looks good, I like how the front turned out. Good luck on the rear.

Wed Feb 12, 2014 5:21 pm

the powdered guide coat is amazing stuff i became addictted to it years ago , no dry time , finds every scratch and pinhole , dosent booger the paper, haz a zillion uses .... fabricator john

Thu Feb 13, 2014 10:54 pm

We mounted the primed fenders so we could measure the finished distance from the fender lip to the tires. Looks like ~1 1/4 to ~1 1/2 depending on where you measure. We wanted to make sure the rear fenders had about the same amount. Took a photo from the front while we were at it:

We test fit the running board to make sure that would not be an embarrassing fit. I think it looks pretty good:

Thu Feb 13, 2014 11:14 pm

We cut along the lines indicated on the post above, and quickly slapped the two together. Looks pretty hopeless:

We then used sheet metal screws to adjust and tweak the position, not looking so bad:

We aligned the new and old fenders based on marking from the top-most fender hole. Oddly, the rear edge lines up very nicely:

After we made some radial cuts, the tail light area actually lay down quite well. The upper-left quadrant is "high", so we will need to adjust that in before welding, and the area between the tail light opening and the bumper strut opening is "low" so again that will need to be bumpped out before welding:

The front edge appears to be way too long:

It does not line up with the running board at all very well. I need to look at how this area is on a factory car so we can shorten the fender if needed:

Fri Feb 14, 2014 4:48 am

Terrific work and good ideas for my own 1303 projects

Fri Feb 14, 2014 4:50 am

Terrific work and good ideas for my own 1303 projects

Sun Feb 16, 2014 8:28 pm

After cutting the fenders, we adjusted the overlap and used sheet metal screws to hold them where we liked them. We then used some spray paint to mark where the top fender lays on the bottom fender:

From there, we marked out by the widthe of the flanging tool, and then trimmed and flanged the fender:

Here is a shot of some of the warly welding on the driver side:

We left the tail light area for the last. Here are the tabs welded, then smmoothed:

Some pounding to counteract the warpage, then more smoothing, and it is getting close to ready for the 2K primer:

Ethan was back on the welding when we moved to the passenger side, so the welding is a bit nicer:

Considering that he did not know how to weld at all when this project started, he is knocking out some beautiful beads. And this is on the thin fender material:

Mon Feb 17, 2014 8:39 pm

I was directed to a discussion on Silicon-Bronze MIG wire, so we held off the remainder of the welding on the passenger side in hopes that the silicon-bronze will do less warping.

We did tackle shortening the front part of the drivers side rear fender. There is such a slope where the fender meets the body in that area that the fender moves moves down about as much as it moves out. Here is a pic of where we were cutting:

And here is the frankenstein patch job. We did not see why to make the under-cut which seems to weaken the fender right where it could use some strength for the running board. So it is now more rectangular:

Mon Feb 17, 2014 8:48 pm

We installed the bumper to make sure there was not any problem with the fog light's position. Even if there was a problem, there is not much we would be willing to change at this point. In any case, the setup looks pretty good. It is intentional that the bumper "trims" the fog light slightly on the top. The cutoff is still due to the optics in the fog light, but the bumper does help trim some of the "overspray" light:

The cutoff of the Hella Micro DE fog lights is pretty sharp:

Here is a deer's-eye-view of the fog lights only on:

The LED DRL (Daytime Running Lights) only:

And, just for kicks, both the fog and DRL on:

Mon Feb 24, 2014 7:01 am

Nice work!

Sun Mar 02, 2014 11:27 am

Beetlebaum wrote: Nice work!
Thanks man. Always a boost to receive kind words :)

We got some silicon-bronze MIG welding wire. It is very interesting. Can't say it is better or worse than the steel wire at this point. Certainly different. It looks like a brazed seam, with lots of copper color. Here is steel weld sandwitched between the silicon-bronze beads, after rough grinding and bead blasting. Not sure if the warping is better or worse--we were getting "pretty good" at welding with the steel 0.023 MIG wire, but are back to being beginners at this 0.030 Silicon Bronze wire:

We continued with shortening the front part of the other rear fender. We mounted them to each other to make sure they matched--this also made them easier to handle and less floppy.

These look pretty rough. We will do more metal work to get them closer to where they need to be:

Mounted up agin to check for symmerty and some more hammer work:

We bead-blasted the welded and ground area to make sure the 2K epoxy primer could get a good bond, then shot the outside of the fenders. The idea here is that the 2K will give the filler a good grip, and will seal any small imperfections in the welds, keeping moisture from getting under the filler:

The uniform color of the 2K epoxy immedaitely makes it look better, although there is certainly evidence of the welds:

The first pass of body filler and rough sanding with 80 grit on the linear air sander shows the multiple high spots that we missed in the initial hammer work. We will tap those down and fill/sand/repeat:

In this shot the camera is lined up carefully with the front and rear outer edges of the fender, so we can see how far the wheel is tucked under the fender. Looks about right to me:

The seame kind of shot, but on the front fenders:

Sun Mar 02, 2014 10:11 pm

Mon Mar 03, 2014 9:30 am

Maddel wrote:

I am with this guy.

Mon Mar 03, 2014 10:51 pm

Just finished reading all 15 pages of this thread. Man, you do VERY nice work. And forgive me if I steal some of your ideas :lol: . I believe you said you got those window actuators for your pop outs, from a mini-van. do you remember exactly what van it was? I'd love to do this, I just wish I didn't order all new latches and knobs for mine, lol.

And I was just trying to figure out where to mount my oil cooler. I have the exact same one as you, and now I know where I'm mounting it, XD.