dbeall1968

Hi friends. I have been away from the CF for quite a long time, and this is a main reason. After being so close to finishing, I had a major setback. I walked away and have not touched the car in nearly a year.

Long story short. After body is done, I mount the weatherstrip on the small piece behind the door. I shut the rear deck lid, and the corner breaks, and a 5 inch crack has developed on the fender. The crack is drivers side, just where the fender meets the deck surround . Now I need to ask how to get at this repair. The convertible top frame mounts right in front of this, so getting behind it is almost impossible. I want to keep the area to be repainted to a minimum, but I will do what's needed to fix it right.
Any help will be greatly appreciated. I hope I can catch up with my old friends here soon.

persuader

Dude thats sucks. Here is my .02. For what its worth. For that crack to appear that far back from the front where the deck lid looks to have struck the upper B pillar tells me that the whole section was weak to begin with. Repairing the damage on the outside is pretty straight forward glass repair but that is unfortunately going to need some structural repair from the rear in order for it to be a good strong repair. I see no easy way in your case to fix it properly. You are also looking at painting quite a bit of the car also afterwards. Again my .02.

doorgunner

I'm sorry to hear that also....I hope you repair it/or get it repaired well so you can finally get on the road again!

It's a great car!

Easy Mike

First determine what caused the decklid to create enough stress to break the corner and damage the fender. Could something have been in the rain gutter when you closed the decklid?

You have a stress crack in the crown of the fender line. You probably cannot get to the backside of this area so your repair will be only on the appearance side.

Alan 71

Hi David,
Good to see you posting, but for the WRONG reasons.
I'd wondered what had happened.
I'm curious about what appears to be fiberglass cloth in the second picture. I'd not expect to see any cloth used in the original fiberglass.
Was there evidence of a repair in that area before you painted the car?
Any chance the 2 places are somehow related to each other? It appears to my eye that the crack extends both towards the front and rear from that 5" area so that will need to be repaired too.
I agree that the repair will need to be done from the outside and will require making the crack look a lot worse before you can work in some mat and resin to do the repair to make it better.
Not Nice!
Sorry!
Regards,
Alan

dbeall1968

Mike,I openedvand closed the deck lid 20 or 30 times before putting on the weather strip. There was nothing in there, it was soley due to the stress of the weather strip pushing on the top of the fiberglass. I did see evidence of a repair about mid fender from a previous owner. obviously the repair was not done properly.

dbeall1968

Alan, thanks for reply. The fiber glass cloth that you see was from me trying to reinforce that corner. when the side cracked, the whole corner went with it. I was afraid that you guys were going to tell me that I have to attack this from the outside. I guess its back to fiberglass, sanding, and paint. I had seen small signs that there had been a repair on the drivers rear, but I never imagined that it was done so poorly. . It looked like a GM dealer repair