Wheel & Tire Clearance – Fender Mods: Part 1

If you take a close look at this picture, you can see that the fenders are actually resting on the tire. Not even on the sidewall, but actually on the edge of the tread surface. I knew it going in, but knowing something intellectually and then going and doing it are 2 different things.  I enlisted some experienced help and we (he, really… I played gopher) got to work

My buddy Michael is a body man by trade, and did about as good a job as could be done on them.

This is at full droop, but we took about 1 1/2″ off of each corner:

You can see the flare he added to the rear fenders here, in addition to the cuts. I still will want to do proper fender flares, but this’ll do just fine for now after cleaning them up.

The rears were a little more work due to having to work around an inner fender along with the outer skin. These are the relief cuts made so that the inner fender could be bent up and out of the way.

They needed some additional trimming and cleanup with various cutting and grinding wheels & stones and some edge trim, but I think the results are good. Not spectacular looking by any means, but a show car this ain’t. The fronts are very flimsy, but that wasn’t exactly a surprise. Just need to be careful when leaning over them.

EDIT: I went ahead and made another little change. I wasn’t happy with how low the inner fender was coming, so I trimmed it back about 1/2″. Now the inner fender is much more uniform, and isn’t intruding into the tires’ paths of travel. Before it was more or less even with the outer skin.