Quote:
Originally Posted by Superhart
I have a very similar problem on my 1930 coupe. A small crack appeared on the driver side, front fender in the middle of the “eyebrow“. Just a couple of days ago I took the car to a body shop to look into repairing the crack, and this is what the technician described for me as the recommended repair: First, he planned to drill a small hole through the fender at the end of the crack to stabilize and prevent spread of the crack. I see this was already mentioned in the previous post. he then said that he would take a Dremel with a cut off disc and basically run the cut off disc along the crack, which at this point is only about one and a half inches long. The purpose of this was to clean up the crock and provide a fresh clean metal on either side. Since the crack includes the lip of the fender, he plans to insert A piece of wire into the fender lip and weld around it. He will then weld the entire crack. I can’t remember what gas combination he said that he would use. Then he planned to grind down the weld to match the surface of the fender. He would just repaint the area and blend it in to the fender color. He said that he could do this without even removing the fender from the car. on the underside of the fender weld repair, he would prime and coat with undercoating to prevent recurrent rust. He promised that when finished, no one would be able to tell there had been a repair in that area, unless they completely stripped the paint off the fender. I am no expert, but the way he described it sounded pretty good to me so I am going to go ahead and let him repair the crock. Thank God he won’t even have to remove the fender from the car to do this. The biggest potential issue therefore is to match the red color of my paint.
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Wow, this post comes from over a decade ago!!
As to your painter's thoughts. Your car, your money, ...your deal however IMO what he is suggesting is NOT the proper way to make this repair.
To begin with, his advice with suggesting the undercoat would have been the first indicator of a botched repair job. Secondly, him using a cut-off wheel to enlarge the crack is foolish. This crack needs to be fuse-welded with a TIG, -and definitely not use a MIG that will overheat the edges of the crack. Third and most importantly, unless the reinforcing wire in the bead of the fender is repaired by splicing a longer wire by removing an inch or two in either direction of the crack, the fracture will be back in a short amount of driving. Forth and finally, since your painter likely has no idea what brand & type of paint the Red on that fender is, the likelihood of your painter making an undetectable blend to a 'knowledgeable eye 'has the odds of about 1 in a 100 of truly being undetectable. There are more shades of red and black paint than almost any other color.
Considering how easy it is to remove a fender, I would definitely make sure the fender was removed, sanded entirely on the outside and inside, then do a full paint on that fender. Again, your car and your money, but IMHO you are throwing it away having this painter make a repair as you are describing.