I was doing a little brainstorming and I was wondering if what I was thinking could be done. What if I got 4 Firebird fenders, LH / RH LT1 style and LH/ RH LS1 style and cut the bottom 1/4 off the LS1 style and fixed it to the LT1 fender. To better describe it, an LT1 fender with the LS1 vents in the sides. The bottom rear 1/4's look similar in shape and countour, so they look like it should match up fine. How would I make them join for good? Plastic welder? Glue and bondo? Anyone?

 

I suppose that you could. I mean you could either fiberglass them together or use a plastic epoxy such as duramix. I'm not sure how well it would work out for ya long term though.

Does anyone even use a plastic welder anymore? I was taught about them in tech school but I haven't ever seen one used.

 

Might be easier to just buy the vents and use them as templates to cut holes the same shape out of existing LT1 fenders. That way, you wouldn't have to ever worry about the lower section of the fender separating from the upper, or at the least, cracks in the paint showing up along the parting lines.

 

that would be alot better because if the fender would end up breakin apart cause its plastic and bondo and fiberglass wont flex if anything ever happend to make the fender flex it would just break off ive never used a plastic welder so i dont know about that

 

fasteddie94 - Yea, I'm not sure how it would work long term either. I know if it was a metal fender, like on my 81, I would just weld it and call it a day.

thesoundandthefury - Yea, I was think about doing that. The only thing would be the LS1 fender sort of molds in towards the vents don't they? I was thinking about possibly just trimming around the vents about an inch and then using some glue and body filler to work them into the LT1 fender. That way I wouldn't be cutting so much fender and not have to risk it falling apart. That would be embarrassing...."Sir, you left your fender about a half mile back there."

Jun10rp - That's what I was thinking too. I've never seen a plastic welder either, it would be interesting if someone knew of one or how they worked. It would be cool if someone on here could do it, it would make modifying plastic bumpers and fenders a lot easier.

Taintedz28 - I'm not really sure how well that would work. The vents on the sides are on top and bottom of the dividing line on the doors, the line on the Camaro is a little higher up than on the firebird. If you tried to put it above and below the middle line on the camaro you'd have the top vent near the side mirrors.

 

They have a plastic adhesive that is structural and will work for this purpose. It's MFG'd by 3M, and only available to Body shops afaik. I've used with with my brother in working on my car and repairs.

It would probably work for this application. I know it's meant to hold things like our doors together, and to bond Saturns together, as well as any other structural plastic. The stuff is beyond tough too; I've used it to bond some tabs together for things, and the plastic of the part broke before the glue did.

No matter what you are going to have some Bodyfiller used, it's used on any car, even plastic ones. The generic bondo's don't work well with our cars, but the more "professional" ones, (Like the green or blue ones) work better.

It is do-able, and with an experienced body-man, it should be able to be done without too much hassle, and turn out the way you want it too.

 

Upon further inspection, it looks like this may be trickier to pull off than I first expected. If you look at the section on the 98-up fender where the scoops are cut out, it appears to be slightly wider than the 93-97 fender. I dunno if they simply shifted the wheel well opening forward slightly or if it's an optical illusion. Maybe the thing to do would be to find somebody who's got a 98+ model and see if you can measure that section to make sure it's the same width as your fenders. The second thing I see as being a challenge is that the "flare" that runs the length of the door and in between both scoops is slightly longer on the 98+ fender, so when cutting the scoops out it looks like you'd have to cut the whole section out as one piece so that that center flare divider would be the correct length when you went to put it on your LT1's fenders.

Now the more that I look at these, I wonder if it might just be easier to bolt the 98+ fenders on your car, and measure the gap from the front of the fender to where it meets the front bumper, and cut the correct width section out of your LT1 fenders and graft it in. Looks like it'd be about a 3"-3 1\2" section. But then again, you'd be back to the issue of how well it'd hold up. Maybe since it would be a smaller section of plastic and wouldn't be "hanging," it might have better odds.

Damn those details.