The Snow Car - Jan 19, 2011

This has not been a good winter for accomplishing much. Other projects keep getting in the way. Getting through the holidays is tough enough, but we've had virtually no good weather this winter, hardly any unseasonably warm days. This first picture was taken a week or so ago, and tells why so little is being accomplished on my car.

Eventually getting on to the right front fender, earlier thinking I can easily have this whole car ready for primer by springtime, I discover that this fender is not as nice as the driver side. So I pulled all my spare fenders down from the archives, to choose a better one. This second picture shows just a few of them. I have one decent fender, but I'm saving it for the convertible I will finally get around to restoring when I'm 98 years old. The one good fender from the archives is too nice for this car.

I spent nearly a whole day last month moving around all the extra fenders, unbolting wheel-wells and hood hinges, looking closely at all of them: and came around to where I started; the one already on the car is the best one for it.

It's a moderate disaster, but so were all the other ones I had in the attic.

Before removing the fender from the car, I've got to straighten the edge of the wheel opening, a difficult place to do any straightening, to get the edge in the right place. I took this short scrap of heavy angle iron, used the bench vise, large hammer and torch, to forge this large hook, which I then welded to an old heavy dent puller. I removed the wheel well, and used this dent puller to slam the wheel edge opening back in to shape.