Prior to my purchase of the car, the prior (second) owner had a quality autobody shop reshoot the blue color no doubt to remedy the heavy stone chipping on the front end of the car that I observed in the late Seventies. The problem was that the front clip, after the respray, had become heavily water-spotted (with hard water) before I bought it (Utah has some very “hard” water). I’d tried for years to polish out the water spots, but nothing worked. No matter what I did, the water spots would return after a few days. Additionally, there were a series of small “dings” along the top of the fenders (and elsewhere) that were unsightly. The body work that preceded the re-spray wasn’t very good – there were a lot of slight surface baubles.

The necessity to respray the front fenders, hood and panel between the fenders prompted me to think more about my childhood fantasy to own a mild custom ‘57 Ford. Every ‘57 model I built – – except my 1979 build of a factory-stock Club Vicky model – – had been a mild (or wild!) custom which reflected some level of my dissatisfaction with some design elements of the car. Therefore, the thought occurred to me: what about mildly revising the front fenders given that they had to be repainted in any event? And what about a few more changes? Therefore, I asked George Layton to remove the “Fairlane” scripts from the side of the front fenders and from the header panel between the fenders (above the grille). Additionally, I asked him to weld the seams that indicated where the factory had mated the fenders to the stamped sheetmetal shape beneath the headlight buckets, and to also remove the potmetal “eyebrows” above the headlights and replace that shape with a length of welded round rod. I also asked George to extend the top-of-fender peak forward a bit. The basic shapes of the front fenders weren’t changed (which are awfully good) but the production/assembly compromises were eliminated.