I’ve disassembled the front end twice in the past to pull the engine, most recently about a decade ago when I swapped the previous 302 for a 331 stroker.
Having done this disassembly before there weren’t a ton of surprises, though I was disappointed to find that I hadn’t been particularly disciplined about using matching hardware during the latest reassembly.
I also had a vague recollection that one of the headlight buckets had been missing a metal tab for one of the screws, allowing it to be loose from the front of the fender. That may have been true at one point, but this time I found that both headlight buckets were missing several sections of metal that help secure them to the fenders. Each piece of blue tape in the picture below indicates metal that is suspiciously absent.
Everything came apart pretty quickly with minimal drama.
This was the first time I was going to be removing the fenders from the car. The passenger side fender was replaced by a shop in 2007 after the car was in a minor fender bender but I don’t believe the driver side fender had been off the car since it was assembled on the factory line. The original white paint visible underneath and the general state of the fasteners seemed to agree with that, a coordinated two person effort was required to get the worst of the bolts free.
The passenger side fender was a breeze in comparison, aided by the fact that some of the better hidden bolts were missing.
With the front clip of the car as naked as it had been over 55 years I called it a day.
