72 duster Build progress

Well, today we had a break in the weather.....well....kind of.

it was raining all day BUT it was in the mid 60's! and it has been in the 30's lately.....so I made sure I got out to the garage and did some tinkering on the duster (hate working in the cold so my projects always slow way down in the winter....plus christmas season takes any "extra" cash).

anyhow.

the duster is "pretty much" down to body work and paint.(still some interior stuff to finish and some minor mechanical stuff but they are close enough to being done that I don't mind putting my attention on the body for the winter).

so as some of you may have noticed in a couple pictures.....my passenger side front fender had been hit at the very front before right where it wraps around the headlight...and when that happened it tweaked the fender outword at the front lip so there was a HUGE gap between the headlight bezel and the fender lip.....I am talking over a half inch gap ( i could stick my finger in it).....the person before my bondoed the dent and the cut in the metal from it being such a hard creased dent ....so it was "hidden" but the gap was still there.

so, I like to not spend money unless its a MUST and I figured either spend good money on a fender and even more to have it shipped...OR find someone with a fender they wouldnt mind cutting up.

and a member here just happened to have one and he cut me out a section of fender and shipped it to me for a good deal.

so what I did was sat and did a bunch of measuring,marking cutlines and so on,drilled all the spot welds off the inner lip,cut out a section of my existing fender where all the bad spots were....and then cut out an identical section from the chunk of fender the fabo member sent me and wire wheeled and primed the inside.

once the chunk of fender was cut out of the existing fender I had access to bump the inner metal back out to its original position.

then I did some tweaking here and there, ground everything down,got it sitting where I wanted it to and then started tacking in place.

it was getting late so I called it a night but I did get it all tacked in place, now just need to do a little more welding, some grinding and some light filler to smooth it all off.

I feel alot better not putting a bunch of bondo in a car to "FIX" it like some people would do.

thats why I am going to save to get my lower quarter patch panels and a tail panel because I don't want a bondo bucket, I am building it to enjoy and know that its done right.

pictures below of what it looked like before.....the fender chunk I received, what I cut out,with headlight and ring in place to show the difference in how much better it all fits together now that there is no huge gap between headlight and fender and so on.

sorry for the long post, just havent posted in awhile and I am a bit excited that I made some progress even as little as it may be.

P.S. don't mind the picture quality, I took them with my phone, I will post better pictures when I get around to finishing up the patch