I got the new fenders and put them on the car in 2009 and it was pretty disappointing. With the fender shoved all the way back the gap was too wide.
I was thinking about welding on the edge of the fender or door but the gap was pretty big. To make it worse I figured out there was no way to save the original LH door skin and had to cut it off. This was actually a pretty low point because I was optimistic to bolt new parts on and everything would fit. It really slowed me down but I decided to just start cutting and fixing.
Cut the firewall bracket off the fender and slid it forward so the fender would slide back more.
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Cut the door skin off to fit a new one.
But it wasn’t as easy as I expected. The new door skin matched the fender more closely but it really fit poorly on the frame so I had to build up the edge of the frame to get an edge to crimp the skin to and also slit the skin and change the shape.
The back edge of the skin was too narrow and didn’t match the quarter panel so I had to slit it and widen to match. Overall the door just about took me out but I hung in there and learned a lot about putting aftermarket parts on an original body.
I was finally able to media blast and prime everything.
Somewhere in there I build a temporary paint both and primed most of the front end pieces.
Was great to get the door back together. Overall the door skin fit was pretty good.
I media blasted the fenders so I could weld on the edges to finish off the gapping process. Probably 80% done. Waiting to build up my TIG skills and refine the gap a little more.
This took many weekends and it was great to get this behind me and finally start to order all the shiny pieces to go on the car.