The Part Of The Car That The Front Fell Off…

If you have never listened to the satirical interviews of comedians Clarke and Dawe, stop whatever you’re doing right now and go visit their youtube channel and prepare to be there for a while.

One of my favorites in the series has become a minor Internet meme in recent years. It’s call “The Front Fell Off”

 

I was reminded of this sketch today after I pulled the front of the Mustang off in preparation for painting:

The disassembly proved to be much easier than expected. I started by taking the headlights off the fenders. Each outer headlight has two rings of chrome: one that highlights the headlight enclosure and one that secures the headlight to a “bucket” and holds it tightly in place. This bucket also allows the headlight to be adjusted. The headlights in the grill only have the inner ring.

With all four headlights taken off the car, I had a ton of parts sitting on the bench just waiting to get lost. Considering my history of taking parts off the car, not labeling them and then not knowing I have them when the time comes to re-install I decided not to take any chances with my parts storage this time:

Then it was time for the main event – taking off the fenders themselves. Each fender is attached to the main body of the car with eleven bolts. Seven of the bolts are right on top as shown in the picture to the right.

Two of the bolts are in the front and affix the fender to the radiator frame.

There are two more bolts under the fender behind the wheel that secure the fender to the cowl area.

The last bolt is hidden in the door jam and requires patience, a few choice curse words and a couple of long socket extensions to get at.

Once all eleven bolts are off, the fender can be lifted up and away from the car and set on a workbench for further disassembly:

By “further disassembly” I mean taking off the splash guard (the plastic piece with the bump held on by three screws in the picture above) and the headlight bucket assembly.

The headlight bucket assembly looks like it’s part of the fender, but it’s actually a separate piece (outlined in purple highlight below) from the fender (highlighted in yellow):

The headlight bucket can theoretically be taken off the car without the fenders coming off, but it’s really really hard to get at one of the bolts so I decided to take it and the fender off as a unit and then unbolt them once I had them off the car.

Here’s what the assembly looks like separated from the fender:

At the end of the day, I had a car without a front:

And a couple of fenders sitting on the floor due to a lack of shelf space:

I keep working my way towards the rear of the car. Once I get everything off, I’ll go back and clean the parts of the car that need to go to the paint shop and then it’ll be ready to head down for a full body makeover.