AM Fender tale of woe....

[LanceM]

I thought I'd pass this on for those looking for a fender in the future. I found in my working towards a repaint that some work I had done to a fender (left front) 20 years ago was coming undone and with further investigation I found was not done well to begin with. Since I live in Indiana spare parts for a 73 have to come from far away as there are no "Datsuns" in the junkyards around here, sometimes if you get someone young enough behind the counter they may have never heard of a Datsun, I digress...

Anyway I decided I wanted to replace the fender, VB and the rest were killing me with the price and shipping... I happend to be looking at some paint at a local place and asked if they could get one... sure enough they had 2 at the warehouse!!!! The next day I was the proud owner of a $189 made in Tawian fender for a Z Just like you get from VB or the other place who's name escapes me...

Looked pretty darn good there on the showroom floor, and only took two days of bending, hammering and cussing to get the damn thing to fit!!! Luckly I was planning to weld on the headlight buckets as I was going to put in solid headlight covers and blend the buckets and fenders into all one piece (I have the molds if anyone wants a set of solid fiberglass headlight covers) because the seam at the front wasn't rolled right all the way around and sure wouldn't have looked right in a stock configuration. Oh and the mounting plate for the headlight bucket was welded in wrong, not a big deal, just had to drill out all of the welds, get it right and weld it back in...

Let's see what else, oh yeah, the rear inner fender fell out during the hammering bending stage, seems the rear crimp was pretty loose even though it has deformed the rear edge prettymuch the whole way down the fender.... and now the best part.....

While blending in the bucket to the fender I find that well, the fender is pretty wavey, no real wavey, wait made in TAWIAN!!!! another 2 evenings icing it up and blocking it down. Should look pretty nice once I'm done, just hope the icing dosen't crack down the road because of the way the damn thing oilcans, oh did I mention that they must have used old steel beer cans to make this out of!!!!!

Just in case you missed it, this thing is all in all a POS! If you ever need a fender for your Z, beg, borrow, steal, kill for an OEM fender, it would have been so much easier if I had....

[dkd021]

About two weeks before Christmas I was looking for a pair of new fenders as well. I had already went the VB Taiwan route & spent about $400 after shipping. I decided to go to my local Nissan dealer & gave them part numbers 63100-N4700 & 63101-N4700. I had them less than a week later. They wanted about $250 apiece for them. I get a 20% discount with my car club membership & both fenders ended up costing me about $425 after tax.

I also bought a new hood from the dealer. I put them on last night to see how well they would fit. Let me tell you, I put on the fenders & hood, & with only a few tugs of the hinges was able to line everything right up. It took me about 15 minutes to get both seams to line up great.

[LanceM]

I never would have thought the dealer would have a fender, live and learn!!

[ncz]

I'm glad I read these posts, I'm in the market for a new left fender also. And I had the VB catalog in hand! DKD gave your numbers to the local dealer and viola 187.00 no shipping, 3 days. How cool. The VB's were 169.00 plus shipping plus install pain. Thanks again