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Finished! Ready to make the fender eyebrow in post Part 5.

1957 Mercedes 300SL front end restoration: Part 4 Fender and Headlight Rebuild

This is Part 4 of a series of posts on the automotive restoration of this 1957 Mercedes 300SL. Part 2 showed all the pieces we made in Part 1 TIG welded together and metal finished to make one headlight housing piece to now offer up to the body as one unit.  Part 3 showed grafting the housing into the body, metal finishing, and final assembly of the light, trim ring, and bumper to round off the restoration of the front left-hand side.

In this post we move at a faster pace, showing first the right hand rebuild of the headlight housing.  Then we move onto the inner and outer right hand fender rebuilds to completion.  Again the metal at the headlight is in a poor state, forcing us to remove the bad material and piece by piece reconstruct the headlight, due to the complexity in such a small area.  Once completed, we move around the corner to the right-hand fender, again the metal is extremely weak with no real body when bolted to the fender eyebrow.  This would be horrible to see if this area was painted and ripples formed in the body work, due to regular tightening of the bolts.  Our remedy is to replace the whole side of the fender with new metal to give excellent shape and structure.

Enjoy the build process.

Mercedes headlight restoration

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Reference lines and measurements are recorded prior to removing any material.
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Rebuild begins, removing weakened material and replacing with new.
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Work in progress.
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Precision time, time for the engineers marking blue to enable precision cuts for the graft in. Newly made headlight housing and mating surface to trim ring.
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TIG welding followed by metal finishing.
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Metal finished
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View of the interior side of the headlight metal finished and trim ring fitted.

Mercedes fender restoration

 

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This area is so thin that when the fender eye brow is bolted on the metal distorts with ease. Because of this problem we have to rebuild with new metal to eliminate the fear of distortion when painted.
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Once the fender section is removed it reveals that the roof of the inner fender has been heavily patched several times. We make a new section as shown.
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Our new section clico’d into place.
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The final section of the right hand fender is cut out and replaced with new metal.
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Again templates are always taken and referenced throughout the rebuilding process.

 

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Our tool to aid making the fender: The English Wheel.
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Fender shaping in progress.

 

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Fender body now TIG welded into place and ready for metal finishing.

 

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Picking out the ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ in the metal finishing process with the aid of engineers blue.

 

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Continuing to reference patterns throughout the metal finishing process to the very end.

 

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Finished! Ready to make the fender eyebrow in post Part 5.

Part 2 showed all the pieces we made in Part 1 TIG welded together and metal finished to make one headlight housing piece to now offer up to the body as one unit.  Part 3 showed grafting the housing into the body, metal finishing, and final assembly of the light, trim ring, and bumper to round off the restoration of the front left-hand side.

The next post will show the restoration of the fender eyebrow to complete this side of the Mercedes.

For more information check out the automotive restoration services we provide at our workshop in Denver.

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