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Thanks for the suggestions on my situation Marq. Taking into account your advice, what I'm now planning to do is, on my bare fender, do the bondo work that is needed, which really isn't very much. I DA'd 98% of it with 80 grit and it's actually pretty smooth. Not a bunch of deep sanding marks. As I do the body work on the fender and the rest of the truck, I'm going to use the spray can primer for sanding. I know that will work good because I did that with with my motorcycle gas tank and the bodywork was flawless. I even stripped it with a scotchbrite pad on my die grinder, and I've got no scratch marks in it at all. The only problem is I used a rattle can to paint it with and when I put gas in it, the paint ran. So after I get all the body work finished, then I will cover the whole truck with the rusty metal Rustoleum primer, and then paint the truck. Still thinking about spraying the paint. Can the primer be sprayed also? BTW...what's the best way to fill in the holes from the emblems and stuff? Weld them or just bondo over them?




You might want to go over that fender with your D/A again with some 150 grit...it'll take out the 80 grit scratches, and it'll take less primer to fill them.

If you only have a couple of holes for the emblems and have a MIG welder, just weld them up...it's not a big deal. You can either use a copper backer, or just cut a small scrap of steel and put it behind the hole and weld it in. Grind it and skim it with filler. You can fill them with body filler, but in order to keep it from just falling through you need a pretty thick layer on top of the holes. Then you need to feather that blob into the rest of the panel. It's hard to get a blob thick enough to be strong and yet small enough it doesn't look funny when painted. Since it has to be raised above the surface of the panel, that's hard to do. If you use a really thin coat and just fill the holes, any pressure at all on them will poke them right through the fender...not cool if you just painted it . Here's my old '73 Chevy 4x4 when I was doing the body work on it...I had just started welding up the trim holes on my replacement fender:

(the fender is hanging on there as a test fit). I didn't bother stripping it until I was done welding. When you have a lot of them, it's kind of time consuming but not that big of a deal.

Last edited by toolbox; 06/20/07 06:37 AM.