Well, here it goes. A little article to the best of my abilities. This little write-up is also assuming that you haven't let Camo hack your fenders on the lake bed at the Hammers with his big mother Sawzall. First, here is a senseless plug for my brother. All this was done by Camrock Fabrications (604)835-3792.
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Tools used:
- Air Sawzall
- Air cut-off wheel
- Die grinder w/ Sanding bits
- Square hammer (I am not a body man so I didn't use a body man's hammer)
- Mini sledge hammer
- Felt pen
- ½" rod
- 8" piece of 1" ID pipe (ID = inside diameter)
- Some jack stands and a welder
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First thing that we did was remove the inner fender plastic skins. Once we had those off, we made sure that the wires for the lights were out of the way.
Then we started by marking the fenders. Of course what we did is not an exact science, but after all was complete, myself and everyone that has seen what we did thought it turned out quite well.
What we did was take the square and set it at 2.5". Then, holding the felt pen in the hole at the end of the square, we started in the center of the fender and went to the front. Once that was marked, we did the same again, heading to the back.
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Once we had the fenders marked, we had to get a starting point for the air Sawzall. To do this, we just simply used the cut-off wheel and made a small 2" long cut.
The thing that we learned after doing the first front fender is, if you can feather the speed of the wheel a bit to slow it down, it doesn't make a burn mark in the paint. The burn mark doesn't really matter, since you wind up grinding down some of the paint later, but if it gets too large, you just have more to paint after.
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Once we had our starting point cut into the fender, we grabbed the air Sawzall and started hacking.
This is quite a nice little tool because the blade is so small, moves fast that the cut was perfect and we found that there was no need for taping off the mark to save the paint.
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With the front of the fender, there is a bolt that holds it on. We cut the mount off and moved it towards the front of the truck , drilled a new hole and bolted it back in later. That way it will still keep the fender in place and sturdy. |
 
End result of front fender hacking.
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The front was relatively easy to do. But as soon as you get to the back, everything changes. The marking of the fenders is the same, the tools used is the same, however, there is more work involved.
Since we were welding on the inside of the fenders, we took the top off and taped down a tarp.
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First you mark and make your cuts and remove the outer fender like the front. The only difference is the inner of the fender also needs to be cut to make it so that you have a nice fender again.
The picture shows the outer cut with the inner left in place.
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To cut off the inner, we did the same as usual, made a cut with the cut-off wheel and then ran the air sawzall through it. We didn't make exact measurements to cut the inner section out as we were welding in all new metal.
As we were cutting and working our way to the back of the vehicle, we tapered off towards the outside. This made it a little easier for us to weld in the new metal.
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Since we were hacking away at the fenders, I thought it would be good to take out the little bit of rust and rot that I had in the corner of the truck.
Now I am rust free!
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Once we had the fenders all cut, we went around each fender and used the die grinder with a little sanding bit to take off roughly ¾" of paint. This gave us a surface to weld the new metal to on the outers. |
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Next for the front fenders, we took the piece of pipe that we had lying around and molded the ½" rod to the fender. Unfortunately I didn't get any pics of the rod molded. We made it to be somewhat of a springy kind of a fit. This kept the fenders shape nice and also made it a lot stronger than stock.
As soon as we had the front fender and rod stitch welded together, we headed to the back.
Then we picked up a 4x8' sheet of body metal from the local metal yard and used the plasma cutter to cut out 2 - 2 x 5' strips. We made the strips wider so that it was easier to weld to on the outer part of the fender.
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Because of the contour of the fender, we opted not to make it one unified piece. We stitch welded in the metal leaving a stitch every 4-6 inches along the outside and inside of the fender. As we laid the stitch, we tapped it with a hammer to keep it tight to the body. Also, a little side note, because the welder is turned down to a lower burn because of using the thing metal, lay the stitch and then hold the metal there with the hammer for a few seconds. A couple times that we didn't do that, the metal just popped off. We did the same from the inside of the fender to weld the top of the inner part of the fender. |
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As we got closer to the front, the metal curved towards the inside of the truck, so we cut it off and stitched in a second piece. We weren't sure how this was going to turn out, but once it was all done, I was very happy with it.
Once we had everything stitched and in place, we laid down short welds at the front, then the back.
So on and so on. And then...
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So now that the new metal is all welded in, we took the air sawzall and trimmed off any excess metal that was hanging out. Then we took the grinder and trimmed everything up nice and neat, getting them ready for paint.
We also carefully ground the inner portion where we joined the 2 pieces together.
Because my truck is so pretty and shiny (hahaha) we did a little bit of body-work and cleaned up any big gouges in the paint. We laid down a small thin bit of Dura-glass to any dents and then sanded it smooth
OK, everything is prepped, now we get it ready for paint.
We used some poly, painters tape and duct tape.
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We laid down the painters tape to the line that we wanted and then duct taped the poly to it. Soon as everything is in place, we put on 2 coats of primer.
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Primer's dry so now we paint. |
All that work, some Boggers, Rockstomper beadlocks and an exo, and this is what I finally came up with...
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