Spent the day with several thin coats/sanding of bondo and finished up with 400 grit then a coat of primer. Tomorrow I'll sand once more, feather edge and prime then base coat. Once good and dry I'll sand with 600 grit and feather in the clear coat a bit then spray on my clear coat. Once that's good and dry I'll 1000 grit then 2000 grit the whole area and I should be good for a month, then I'll do a good polish/buff.



Today's pics:

I've still got some finish sanding/shaping to do so this is not the final primer finish:

You sure your not a body man????????

Looks awesome

dang thats looking really good

Thanks guys!

Nope, I never had any help learning body work as I learned it all on my own over the years and it seems you never stop learning. I've watched many people do it and asked a lot of questions, a lot of trial and error just like most anything else.

An old timer once told me that you have to remove every bit of rust before you can do anything else, he said just assume there's even more rust there even if you can't see it and get rid of it. He also said that primer is the liason between metal and paint. Metal and paint do not mix, but with a coat of primer in between them it acts as a barrier between the two, neither can touch each other, therefore no problems.

However, this is the first time I've ever had to actually cut out any metal and had to cut out pieces of both the outer and inner fenders. I borrowed a mig-welder, something else I've seen done but never done myself and worst part was that I got really frustrated for the first day and a half before I found out for myself that the polarity of the gun and ground were reversed. After that I practiced a while until I could get the voltage and feed-rate as best I could, again by trial and error. Of course I had to cut and form both pieces to fit and make a gazillion 'tac-welds' to prevent warping/shrinking from the heat, again lots of trial and error.

I took my time and as you can see it did'nt turn out too bad. I've got one small spot to bondo again, final sand, primer, sand again and then feather the base coat right to paint my base coat on - Dupli-color spray can. Then a lot of sanding and feathering the clear coat to spray on my clear coat - Dupli-color spray can. Then I'll give it all a good month to dry before I polish and buff it to final finish.

In another day or two I'm going to go behind the fender with a spray can of rubberized undercoating and if you've never used it, you'd be amazed at how well it really bonds and protects. I'll post more pics after my base and clear coat are done, hopefully tomorrow.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: HEMI-PUP,

Steve, you're a man of many, many talents!

I would use the "I Agree" icon here, IF it were working!

Having rebuilt many old total losses years ago, I must say you have done a fine job on your truck. You saved a lot and learned a lot. How can you beat that.

Ok, after lots of sanding/wet sanding between coats I was able to get the final primer, base coat and clear coat on today. As it turned out, the color match by Dupli-color was not exact (I didn't expect it to be) and what you see below is the semi-finished product with a whole lot of 600/1000/2000 grit wet sanding to blend the clear coat in. Now I'm going to get one of those 3M (I think) final polish and buff kits I've seen and it should all blend in pretty good.

It's far from perfect, but I'm very happy with the results and at least the rust is gone and one less thing to worry about getting worse.

Done. Spent the day wet-sanding and polishing and except for the poor color match I'm done with my fix. The only thing left to do is undercoat really well and I should be good to go.

Not too bad for basically a novice and about $50.00 well spent.

Looks great. Nice job, better than I've seen some bodymen do.

Great job, wanna fix the dents and knicks in mine ?

Looks like a really good job to me. And it all reminds me of how much I hated living in the rust belt.

nice job looks really good

Looks pretty good. Heres a tip though. When you spray on your primer don't use tape like yo did to make it out. Gives you a tape edge thats hard to get ride of.
You can use tape to keep the over spray back but stick it on and roll it back then take a second piece of tape to stick it down.
Would have made you life much easier.

looks real good