Alright fellas,

I was working on my car this afternoon and noticed that my passenger side fender is no longer sitting flush with the passenger door? As in, the fender where it aligns near the door is bulging out. There is no bulges on the other locations near the brackets. The bulge appears to be closer to the upper bracket inside the door trimmings. There appears to be no damage to the paint, fender, or door. I plan to remove the fender tomorrow and take a look at the brackets and see how they align.

Since I never removed a fender before, is the fender adjustable where the brackets are? Are you able to push up or down to play with fitment? I searched the web and they talked about using shims (washers?) to aid with fender alignment.

Any advice or insight would be great.

Thanks

 

The fender doesn't have any brackets. It just attaches with bolts to the unibody chassis. There are 2 bolts underneath the side skirt, 1 behind the side mirror, 3 along the top edge under the hood, and 1 under the side of the front bumper.

The holes are a bit larger than the bolts, so they allow some adjustment. I would just loosen the 2 under the side skirt, by the mirror, and the 2 under the hood closest to the windshield, and try to play around w/ the alignment.

You'll have to remove the side skirt to get to the bottom 2 bolts. Once you do that, you can play around with the alignment with the door closed. When you get it like you want it, tighten the bottom 2 bolts and the 2 under the hood that you loosened. The one by the mirror can only be accessed while the door is open, so tighten that one last.

 

^^^Thanks for your adice man.

UPDATE: I loosened the fender bolts and could not play with it enough to lay flush against the passenger side door. So I decided to remove the fender. Afterwards, I figured that if I insert body shims on the upper door bracket it will aid to allow the door to stick out more to sit flush with the fender.

So after trial and error with how many shims to insert in the two upper bracket bolts. Not the bottom bracket. Since the bulge was occurring up top. I finally got the fender and door to sit FLUSH. GYEAH!!.

So I put the fender back on but noticed that if I bolted the two bolts on the bottom of the fender (behind the sideskirt) the fender will bulge out again. So I decided to drill new holes beneath the oem fender holes where I can bolt the fender down.

It's a good feeling knowing that I managed to fix this myself and saving 175.00 of body work based on the estimate I got this morning.

So before you guys ever decide to pay to get something done, if its not that bad don't hesitate to take a look for yourself because you may be able to fix it yourself.

PEACE YA'LL