Part of being a good metal worker is the ability to read a panel and what needs to be done to correct an issue or make the metal do what you want. Once you are “in-tune” with the metal you can correct some pretty crazy damage in a panel. This really comes in handy when you’re faced with body damage. In most cases a smashed up bolt-on panel like a front fender would just warrant a call to a sheet metal supplier, a trip to the junkyard, or an eBay search, that is if you have a “common” vehicle. In this case Sean from Empire Fabrication was brought a real steel Porsche 356 that had been involved in a hit and run. The drivers side fender (luckily?) took the majority of the force and crumbled it in pretty good. Sean decided to take some pictures during the process of reversing the damage and getting the fender ready for a repaint.
Above you can see the damage in detail. The fender was hit hard and caved it in just above the wheel opening. Luckily the panel wasn’t ripped or torn which would have made this process much more difficult.
Here’s the untouched passenger side for reference. The goal is to get the beautiful shape of this classic German fender back on the drivers side.
Sean started by cutting out a few thin strips of metal he would be using to make patterns from.
After cutting out the strips he bent them 90 degrees in the break.
He then used his Eastwood shrinker/stretcher to slowly bend the pieces into the exact shape of the fenders both top to bottom and laterally across the belt line of the panel. Care was taken to get these fitting perfectly so he could get the drivers fender as close as possible.
Above Sean test fits his custom made contour gauges to the passenger fender.
When using his contour gauges on the drivers side fender you can REALLY see how bad the panel is damaged.
Sean then determines and marks out the major points of impact that will require the most work throughout the project
The next step requires some mechanical advantage and some brute force. Sean uses a hydraulic ram kit to force out the major dents in the panel and hammers on key areas with the teardrop mallets to release some of the damage.
With the damage “roughed out”, paint and body filler were sanded off until the damaged area down to bare metal.
At this point Sean has started to planish out that large creases left in the panels next to the major damage. He used a combination of a small pneumatic planishing hammer and the “off-dolly” hammering technique to level the lows and highs.
After getting the panel a lot closer, Sean checks back to the template. He realized he now needed to heat shrink some of the higher spots. The spots are the same he had marked out earlier in the process. Then began the process of slowly planishing out any minor imperfections; using the bullseye pick to take care of any small low spots in the panel.
Once again progress was checked with the template. Here the top portion of the panel is very close to where it needs to be.
The lower portion of the fender still needed more heat shrinking and off-dolly hammering to get it to match the template better. The panel is getting very close though!
After some more time with the planishing hammer and a hammer and dolly the panel was ready to be sanded with a DA sander to smooth out any minor imperfections and to give the panel a uniform finish that’s ready for high build primer. The time to finish this project may not be worthwhile if you’re working on a vehicle that original panels are easy to find for, but in this case it was very important to keep the original sheet metal on the car and a replacement fender would be difficult to find regardless.
Thanks Tony,
If you take a look at our Youtube channel we literally have hundreds of videos that are mostly all educational.
Get a copy of the key to Metal Bumping from eastwood an you will learn a lot of the fundamentals on metal repair
Appreciated the stills and notes, but I agree with other posters that this kind of thing really needs to be done in video now. If you’re going to sell all these tools, please spend more effort on education of how to use them well. Thanks.
perhaps you should reconsider, it looks more like primer to me.
THANK YOU FOR THIS IFORMATION BUT NEED MORE IFORMATION ON THE PLANISING HAMMER TECH WORK THANK YOU
Having been in the Automotive business for 45 years 14 to 15 years of that strictly in the body and painting end of it this is great work! more often than not it’s knocked out just enough to slather Bondo on it and is vertually sculpted back to its original shape. this is what we call in the trade metal finished looks as it did when it left the manufacturer! Beautiful!
so that’s how it’s done,amazing
I also would like to see a video, I bought a shrinking dolly and hammer ttry and shape an old scout fender….not much luck. A video on technique would be great.
I agree more action less talk
Looks. Like. He. Has. Done. A. Very. GOOD. Job. On. The. Car. I. Would. Like. To. Do. That. On. My. Next. Project
Really enjoy reading these tech tips, They are easy to understand and can be very helpful towards pointing one in the right direction. Then practice, practice, practice.
Very good insight,but I agree with another comment I saw where the person says it needs to be a video with narration
Look closely this fender was a bondo bucket!!
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Looks really good, hopefully I can get these results one day.
Good for what it is, but you left out all the “good stuff”. This needs to be a video to actually show HOW it’s done. With narration.
Not trying to be ungrateful, but this is really just a tease.
A good review of how to do it right. A video as suggested by an earlier reader would help. Rebuilding sheet metal on pre 1950 cars with their heavier metal and hard to replace body parts often demands a professional and at very least the right tools. The Porsche is a good example.
awsome job ,will be looking into ordering some more tools that can help me learn better skills
Beautiful attention to detail. Made me wish I still had my 356C.
Great example… would love to see more action shots and techniques of the progress, such as the planishing hammer and heat shrinking. Nonetheless excellent work.
Good reading. Easy to follow and I liked the way the techniques were explained.
Is this going to be a serial repair going from the damage portion to the work required for prepping for the finish through the spray painting of the damage?
Great work keep em coming!
It would be nice to see some of those techniques used in a in-depth tutorial video
Good job looks good except seemed there was a lot of bondo on there from before wouldn’t that also have to come into consideration as well on overall shape or should it have been removed as well thanks D.
thanks, good insight for me, a non professional, but like things done correctly, for this do it myselfer.