Fighting With A Fender While Holding A Cold At Bay

Last night I went to bed with a little bit of a runny nose. This morning I definitely had a full blown cold. Cold or not, I had a fender to prep. Mario (my paint and body guy) is coming over on Wednesday night to pick up the fenders, hood, and few other small parts. He wants to get them stripped, get body work done and get them in primer. That means I need to get the insides of fenders painted with POR-15 so they are ready for him to take. It will be nice to get them out of the garage and out of the way.

I went out to the garage as soon as I woke up and turned up the heaters. The last thing I wanted to do was work with water in a cold garage when I did not feel good. It took until 10:30AM or so for the garage to get up to temp, but as soon as it was above 55 degrees I started working on the passenger fender.

I still had that stubborn ground effects bolt to remove. We had tried previously to remove the bolt when the fender was still on the car but could never get it to budge. Today, as you can see from the tools I gathered, I was not taking no for an answer. I was prepared to cut the bolt off if I had to. 

It did not come to that though. I used a little PB Blaster and let it penetrate into the bolt. I worked with the vise grips until I got it to lock onto the pan head of the bolt nice and securely and then used the socket to turn the nut loose. It was not easy going but it did start to turn. I got the bolt 90% unthreaded and then SNAP. The bolt broke in half. Either way it was off and I was happy.

With the bolt removed I laid the fender on a couple of tarps on the garage floor and began to scrub on it with a wire brush. Once I had loosened up all of the dirt, rust, flaking paint, etc. I used the vacuum to clean the fender off.

I was trying to figure out a way to clean this fender with MarineClean and rinse it off in the garage. It was much easier when it was outside and I could put it on a saw horse and just spray it off. I decided to use some bungee cords to hang it from the hooks in the ceiling above the tarps. This way I could clean it and the water and cleaner would run off the fender.

While I was cleaning the fender with MarineClean I decided to clean the Panhard/track bar brace at the same time. Once both of these were cleaned and rinsed off I kept them wet with Prep and Ready for thirty minutes.

Here is the fender after being cleaned and prepped.

Here is the Panhard/track bar brace after being cleaned and prepped.

I had previously cleaned the driver side fender. I just needed to hit it with the air compressor to blow off the dust that had accumulated on it. I did not feel like doing anything else today in the garage so tomorrow I will paint these.