Custom Fender – Part II.d (Bondo!)

Can it be bondo times now? (read: stupid caturday compositional risk). Time for another custom fender update, and as you may have guessed it’s all about bondo!

What do you say instead of me blabbing about it, we just get right into it?

Lots and lots of bondo. Yummy! This stuff hardens pretty quick, and is startlingly easy to work with. Maybe it’s normal, and we’re just used to how much of a pain fiberglass is to work with, but bondo was a very nice change of pace. As you can see, we were very liberal with it (and we had to be, better safe than sorry). We figured we’d just start thick and sand down. So here we are. We used some graters to do the really rough and excess ridges, but for the most part we used various sanding instruments and eventually moved to sponges with finer grits.

Progress…
 

More Progress!!
 

Almost done with the grater
 


Honestly, this test fit was completely unnecessary. It really didn’t help us do anything except see what it looked like…sort of. I mean, the fender wasn’t even cut, it was BARELY sanded down…but we just couldn’t help ourselves. I think this was us taking a break because our fingers had cramps. Now for a time lapse, because the in-between-shots are even more boring than the pictures I’m already forcing on you.


First coat of bondo relatively complete.
 

As you can see, there are lots of bubbles, and the spine is very faint.
 

Once you start using Bondo, I propose that you are never really done with Bondo. So far I have been right… So we needed to make the spine more prominent. Since none of you can see where we’re cutting the fender, you’ll have to wait and see the end result, but we know the fender is going to be very short, just barely beyond the passenger seat in fact. If we’re going to make a spine it needs to be very prominent, or else risk looking simply like a dent or imperfect bend. We took a strip of metal mesh, 4 inches wide by 14 inches long, (the same mesh we used on the interior reinforcement) and bent it width wise in half to make a V shape. Upside down and placed over the faint spine and completely filled and surrounded it with bondo. Here are the preliminary results! If you enlarge it, you can see the mesh poking out the end (which is fine). Not only can we trim the metal later, but we’re trimming the whole fender so the sloppiness of the edge is really of no consequence.

 
 

Honestly, who needs a DSLR when you have floodlights? This dramatic lighting was unintentional but it definitely shows how much more drastic the spine has become. This experience has really changed how I see bodywork. I no longer see something like this as ugly, it’s simply not beautiful yet. You also might notice the whole fender is a bit messy. We attempted to fill in a lot of bigger bubbles with the heavyweight bondo. Something I recommend doing only once, but since we didn’t learn about light weight bondo for bubbles we ended up doing this several times as you will see in the pictures to come.

Initial Bondo is nearly complete!
 


We finished the prime sanding, up to 220. This is nowhere near complete, but it’s finally starting to look like it’s heading somewhere. Just a teaser, these are the first cut lines we drew out. Don’t mind the stripes on the sides, I’ll explain those in the next update