1939 Coupe Sedan (Sloper) custom

Moving to the lower front or the fender now, the area below the headlight. This is one of the most obvious accident damage/repair locations. I guess the stove in area was banged out to a generally smooth condition with little concern for the actual shape. At least that’s what it seems like. It’s quite an inward yet compound curve below the headlight but on this fender it was relatively flat. Fortunately the other one is in perfect shape so I did a lot of checking and comparing with a small profile gauge to determine what’s what.

I made a cardboard profile to determine what I needed to do shape wise on the lower lip and as you can see, it was way out!

I also had a couple of patches to do as well. This one and the section where the bumper irons project (a shitty old repair with braze, as seen in a pic in a previous post)

As a help I made inner and outer profiles in thick ply to act as a kind of clamping buck to hold the shape once I had the lip curve about right. Some judicious banging brought the area under the headlight into the acceptable zone. Between this and getting the lip contour right things improved a lot, much to my relief (I’m making this up as I go.)

Here you can see my initial rough cut out of the bumper slot. The patch was a little bigger, with rounded corners.

Looking better:

This is how it looks on the car. Much better than before.

With the fender on the car I thought I would attack the wheel arch. As seen in previous pics, this one was very bad.

From the lower radius patch all the way to the area I just finished at the front, that piece of rod is welded in, in addition to many old repairs. I’d like to cut that all out and put in a whole new wheel opening. I didn’t like the idea of having to make that, but luckily I have another right side fender. It’s from a Standard, but fortunately, the lip is in pretty decent shape. No rod welded in and only one (butcher) repair in the usual location.

So I cut a section out and dropped it in my de-rusting tank. Actually, a kitchen rubbish bin, so it didn’t fit in whole, but this was a result after a week.

The lip is good inside.

My chemical of choice is plain white vinegar. The cheapest home brand stuff from the supermarket.

Time to fit this patch…take a deep breath!

I thought I’d try the template first, just for fun. As it turns out in it’s life of repairs the fender has taken on a shape of it’s own in this location too! Mmm.

After some pondering and trial fitting I decided to cut a slit up through that old repair weld at the top where the shape starts to go off. My thought was to relieve some pressure and allow the shape to conform better. In the end the slit went twice the width of the patch, but seemed to help.

Here is the patch in place.

Tacked

I went with Fitzee’s ‘cut and butt’ method.
The finished job turned out like this. I’m pretty happy/relieved at this stage. The large patch solved multiple issues in one go which was good. Feeling much better about this fender now.