Rob's Camaro Flares

[SumTingWong]

Originally Posted by Kerry Pinkerton

I hope you can bring it... would be a fun project. You can buy the foam board locally at the Herkimer Lowes as well as the contact cement and tape for FSPs. Fiberglas strapping tape is harder to find for some reason. I usually have to hunt for it. Walmart doesn't carry it any more...at least I can't find it.

I suspect Marty/Dutch have some 20 ga they'd sell you but you should check with Marty.

What days are you planning on being there?

I just ordered three sheets of .20, 2ft x 4ft.. I have time to stock up on a couple more, just in case we make progress.

I'll be there Thurs morning thru saturday night, and I'm getting hitch prices as we speak. Trailer rental from U-Haul is like 50 bucks a day, which considering what I was planning to do that weekend was going to cost me much more- I'm getting off mucho cheapo, with money left over to buy more tools.
Assuming I can sneak them in the garage without my girlfriend seeing them..

[SumTingWong]

Just to see how hard it would be, I took the lower left section, made a rough cardboard template and cut a piece of .22 ga.

The corner has two reverse curves.

I also learned that you can cut your pieces too large, and the effect the extra metal has on your shape as you go can lead to a lot of extra hammering and head scratching. It took me a while to figure that one out.

If I had a beater bag, this would have been much easier, I think. Right off the bat, I would have stretched he opposing curves first and then shrunk the sides in. I used a bowling ball, my trusty bowling pin hammer and the belly of my stump cutout to make rough out shape and then went to a urethane mallet, and finally a fender hammer to tweak it.

This is the top view looking in behind to show the fit to the wire frame.


It's not planished, and the clamp pulls the lower left edge away from the body- But it fits reasonably close when held freehand up to the car. Yes, there are gaps, but I did it too see if how I saw the shaping process in my head matched what was put to metal. Very close in some ways, waaay off in others.

[Kerry Pinkerton]

That's the idea Rob. I suspect the final shape you want it a bit more complex. If you go back to the first photo you posted, it appears the profile goes back parallel to the main body near the fender. That would make a cross section profile more of a flattened 'S'. Maybe like this:flair.jpg

Are you keeping the fender opening the same?

[SumTingWong]

Originally Posted by Kerry Pinkerton

That's the idea Rob. I suspect the final shape you want it a bit more complex. If you go back to the first photo you posted, it appears the profile goes back parallel to the main body near the fender. That would make a cross section profile more of a flattened 'S'. Maybe like this:Attachment 813

Are you keeping the fender opening the same?

I believe the opening is the same, BUT, I need to know for sure. I have pics of the finished QP from every angle, and to the naked eye, it looks the same. I got a call from Fikse wheels yesterday in response to a query about a mock-up rim. I'll know this evening what they have and how much it'll cost. All I need is a rim of the same dimensions and offset... I could care less about color, condition, etc.

Also, your'e correct on the final piece having more contour to it. It's the piece that leads the eye to the flared QP and the wheel inside- It needs to be a polished introduction, as I forsee it. They cheated on the 2000 car- the bead around the wheel opening is just a hoop shape laid slightly over. Mine will mimic the contour of the current wheel opening at the bottom.

[Kerry Pinkerton]

If the wheel well opening is the same, you could cut it about 1" back from the lip, move it out the appropriate distance and tack it in place with 1/4" rod. Then the issue becomes to blend from the existing fender to the new lip location.

A little more welding but less work tipping the edge and getting the opening right.

Btw, May I change the title of this thread to "Ron's Camero Flair" or something more in line with the actual thread content?

[SumTingWong]

Sure.. Go right ahead. It's kind of evolved into that.

Anyhoo.. I finished framing out the fender. It came out really well, in terms of having the final shape I wanted, and also imparting the information needed for the sheet metal.
Most of the information is linear, and lateral. The vertical pieces welded in are largely for rigidity and to hold one piece to another.

There are, I'm sure one or two "MHH" spots, but I'm bringing some extra rod along to New York in case they look at it and need some more pieces put in.



You can run yor hands along the rod and feel the shape and the flow, so I'm fairly confident it'll work as a buck of sorts.



View from the rear.


I'm getting better at welding- This was my introduction to mig welding.

[Jacob]

Great project Rob.

Thanks for the pictures.

And thanks for taking us along for the ride.

[SumTingWong]

Whelp..

Ye olde flares are coming along nicely, and my girlfriend has lodged an official complaint. It seems I spend an inordinate amount of time in the garage making a lot of noise, with little to show for it in her eyes.

*sigh* Wimmens just don't understand.

Ay any rate- I went out and bought a few stainless steel dog dishes from PetSmart. The Yorkie/frou-frou size dog dish makes a perfect shrinking disk if you cut the bottom out.

(I shall call it.. The shrinkie-dink)


It works pretty well. Great for attacking small bumps, but I used it to take down a 10in. area that was over stretched from a bad pattern. It took about two hours, but I was being cautious, since I had never done it before.


Welding with a HF 90 Mig welder proved to be an exersize in too little, too much. I practiced on some scrap, and then attacked-

A few holes, and then too little penetration. I eventually got it sorted out.
After spacing out my tacks, I went back and filled them in one tack at a time at first, then figured out that three quick tacks in one second apart was the best. Four would burn through, and two didn't penetrate. It seemed to keep the spatter down and keep the surrounding metal just hot enough.

So- I then took a flap sander to it- Not a god idea. It made waves in the metal. It's hard to define the contact point on one of those, so it ground a little too deep in places, making it a little wavy. Next time, I'll use the standard grinding wheel. That center section will need some bondo. *hangs head in shame*



This is all from what Kerry, Dutch and Bob Baisden taught me. Amazing people.

[SumTingWong]

I thought I'd update you all on the epic fender flare saga. I posted this over on the meet, so I just copied and pasted-

The two hardest words in the English language for me are "help" and "I don't know". This has come back to haunt me more than once, but you'll see as you read on.

Since I owe all knowlege of metal shaping to the members of this site, I thought I'd post this in one shot.

This all started when I saw this pic.



I was hooked, and I had this in the driveway, just waiting to either be sold, or be made into something different.


I looked high and low for a kit you could buy to get that look, but not a soul (at that time) made one, and to top it off, I wanted to do it in steel.

At first, I thought wooden molds could be CNC'd out of laminated 2x4's and pressed, but I couldn't find any luck there, either. I was left with no other option but to make my own.
My automotive experience up to this point consisted of two water pumps, a tune up, two Opti-spark replacements, and three starters.
I had a ten gallon compressor, a floor jack and a small set of sockets, so I pulled it in the garage, and off I went.

I started by trying to make a foam buck out of PU foam, but I just couldn't get the contours right, so I looked up some wire frame bucks, bought a cheap HF mig welder and made a wire frame.


I loaded the car on a trailer, went to Marty and Dutch's meet in Herkimer, and there I pestered Kerry, Dutch and Bob Baisden, who taught me hands-on metal shaping for dummies.

This is what I made after buying more tools (a LOT more..) and here it is just about ready to be mounted, or so I thought.


It's a shame. CS is so easy to work with, welds to gether nicely, and it should go on pretty easy, right? WRONG.

94 GM cars began using an early derivative of HSLA, or High Strength Low Alloy steel. This, and regular CS steel do NOT like each other at all, and when I tried to weld on some small set-up pieces in preparation for this, holes and molten garbage ensued. Okay. Cut out the wreckage, and try again. And again.



The pieces along the top are a result of torched pieces having to be made in CS. I liked this part, and they came out really nice, using a chisel, angle iron and a mallet. The vertical and horizontal axis matched the gaps and adjoining panels perfectly, but they were brazed on- Silicone bronze. The welds were still awful, and weren't trustworthy. A few tugs, and they'd come apart. That's three different kinds of metal, and it's turning into frankenfender.
I worked on this for a month, trying all sorts of pieces, but you can weld HSLA once, and once only. I gets very weak and brittle, so for every mistake I made, more stock steel had to go onto my rapidly growing scrap pile.

The next headache was my plan to move the fuel filler door back and up, which meant I had to cover the fuel tank neck tunnel to seal it off from the inside of the car.
This was a PITA. No two sides go the same direction, so I mocked up a cover in chicken wire, firmed it up with tape, and took an FSP from it.
It's also bonded on. It needs to meet the QP, the wheel well and still be a tight seal.
It's the grey blob with the clecos stuck in it while it sets.


There.
Now, back to the QP.
Since The piece I had carefully fabbed to fit on in one piece was now useless, I had to find a donor car. This took three weeks, which is odd- They made a ton of these cars, and any version would do- V-6, SS, Z-28.. I finally found one, and went over and chopped off a QP, since I'm now much better at removing steel than putting it on. 50 bucks later, I have a new lease on life.

Here, I started learning about the metalshaping properties of HSLA. It stretches, but only to a point. You can weld it to itself, but only once. I gets brittle and work-hardened. It has a memory.

Here, you can see that I have it shaped, but -I had to weld in a patch, because the fattest part of the fender just wouldn't stretch any more.


I worked it to death, wheeled it, hit it with the Uber-Hammer and blew shot out the side of my shot bag, but it would not stretch that extra quarter of an inch.
I was swinging this over my head at the end, one handed, because if I didn't it would jump up and smack me in the head. One hand for the hammer, one to hold the piece in place.
That's a 12 lb bowling ball on an axe handle, and I only succeeded in blowing out the side of my shot bag and getting disgusted. If I did this for a living, it would have taken 10 years off my career in joint damage.


The back half was a piece of cake. A few walnuts, match it to the FSP, and wheel it out.


I welded the pieces together, using thin strips from the scrap pile as filler, and got to the door jamb as the final welds.


(One nice thing about gas welding is the lack of prep needed. Heat it and beat it.) I'm stitch welding, sort of. I had the door gaps all lined up and so I wanted to keep the warpage to a minimum.
Hammering out the welds here goes like this- drop the torch, pick up the hammer and dolly, reach inside the panel. Burn fingers, drop dolly down into the depths of the panel. Fish the dolly out of the bilge tanks, lay it up against the now cool weld, and swing the hammer. Drop dolly again, since I missed the dolly, and smacked the exact spot my knuckle was laying against the steel (holding it in that tight spot requires hands the size of a ferrets' paw).
Fish dolly out, cut arm. Wrap arm in solvent soaked shop rag, fish dolly out again. Notice that solvent in a fresh wound burns like a bad case of mutated nuclear VD. Repeat, and marvel at your own vocabulary of swear words.

After all is said and done, you close the door, and it's then that you see how much this stuff really shrinks. Door gaps are off, and now you have to try to stretch it in place. After a week of that, I gave up, broke out the grinder, and amputated it.



I had no choice, but I knew once it was out, there was going to be no real neat way of welding a piece in. Not only that, I'd have to fab a piece and bond it in. The wood is in there to keep the curve while I stretched the metal beside the door jamb. This stuff will borrow from itself when you stretch it. Finding a decent donor piece would take too long, so after watching David's DVD, I got bold and made this piece by hand.



I routed out a hammer form of sorts, and started to hammer it out. I then bent a piece of 1/4 in cold rolled rod and hammered over that, and finished with a chisel on a beater bag.
The lines aren't cleaned up in this pic, but we're not going for a Ridler.
I tightened it up, cleaned the lines up and bonded one side, and ran out of bonding glue. More is due in on Wed.

Here it is, welded on- I have covered the welds in filler, since I also have the tendency to over grind my welds, and if I hammer on them too much, they crack. It's also hard to resist smoothing out the welds when you're planishing the panel. The welds will be the last thing to be finished, after I plane off the bondo. They are 90 percent done under there, but I've done enough backtracking at the moment.

[John Kelly]

Hi Rob,

Sorry I'm late to this thread, but I could not see the pictures until the later ones were posted. I've never worked with HSLA steel, but I think you might have been better off using a palm nailer with a stainless carriage bolt to stretch the metal, then smooth, then stretch again. Each session of stretching needs smoothing in order to relax the metal. A shrinking disc after hammer and dolly smoothing might help with this. I have stretched smaller quarter panels 2" out from stock this way. On a large quarter panel I would think you could stretch it 3" or more without running into problems. The more surface area to be stretched, the less thinning it takes to move it out a certain distance. I would be curious about trying this on HSLA steel to see how it goes. That bowling ball hammer is cool but it does not have a small enough contact point to stretch very much. My youtube videos show fender stretching as well as flare making from scratch. The 2 techniques can be blended to make all kinds of flares. It is a lot of work as you have found out, but you can make some very nice shapes this way including reverses to blend flares into the body where required by your design.

John www.ghiaspecialties.com