**Episode 415: Miata Bodywork Update**

If anything does happen to catch on fire, we've got that covered. However, I don't think you know - nothing's going to catch on fire. We've both panels trimmed and pretty well fit together so now it's time to weld them together. We're really just trying to seal this whole thing up so that water and debris can't get into the chassis. So, it's not like a structural Weld, and that's a good thing because we're welding body panels which are very thin sheet metal.

Uh, and if you put a bunch of heat into them, it's very easy to warp them. So, the way that we're going to weld this together is what's called Stitch welding. It's basically just a bunch of tack welds spaced out so you're only putting a little bit of heat into an area at a time. I'll basically just hit one little weld, move over here and hit one little weld, and just keep going until the whole thing is welded up.

Probably going to be porous, to be honest, uh doing it that way but that's fine because we've got that 415 Seam Sealer now. Again, we're working near the gas tank, and now we're welding so head on a swivel have your wet towel nearby and fire extinguisher okay going to goop this on real nasty like.

Now that we've got our goop all gooped on and it's still wet, we're going to go ahead and throw our rib nuts in. I almost forgot - we've got our fender flares pretty much done but we also got a front lip so we're going to put that on right now.

Let's see what we've got Jimmy tell me all about it what did you order? Okay, so this is an AR Speed OEM style front FP. We were actually supposed to get these OEM front lips but we never got them in the Stack - what a tragedy! Too low yeah well that's how you know they're cool especially with these Thunder flares now very cute and aggressive cute and aggressive that's exactly what we're looking for.

You know it's going to feel nice giving this front lip to the Miata where it should have had it all along yes 30 Shades of Black by the end - 30 Shades of Black that's a good point Eddie. This thing is going to be all sorts of different shades of black but we are going to try to fix that in the future uh we're going to wrap the car in the future something I've been avoiding for pretty much my whole life it seems like just brutal work.

But that's in the future today, we got to get this lip installed now. This thing is a Miata wow back in the saddle again I'm back in the saddle again - it's nice to be back on the Miata doing some work I feel a little bit reinvigorated she's got some new body parts and pieces yeah looks a little bit better.

This thing's always been really beat up, and I've always dreamt of kind of fixing the body up this is a start yeah this is a start that kid literally look at your car look at your Fender Flare look at him see see he knows he got busted he got busted to take Jake over here okay.

We're both smiling so it's all good but is installing fender flares really worth it? Yeah you know it feels the exact same but I know that it looks a little bit better so sure right now it looks like a little bit of a hodge podge we got a bunch of Shades of Black going on yeah.

But uh that'll be fixed yeah that can be fixed and I think we will fix it woo well yeah so this has been a fun episode in the future I think uh some new wheels are probably in order, and a little bit of wrap get this thing looking brand new what color I think you'll have to wait and see ooh.

But hey thank you guys so much for watching this episode I hope you learned a thing or two along the way hope you're excited to see the Miata back leave us a comment uh letting us know what else you want to see us do to it and uh don't forget to subscribe to the channel like the video throw it down any random comment whatever's in your Noggin throw it down there.

And uh we'll see you guys next time thank you.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're installing fender flares on the Miata you know what I'm talking about these things fender flares let you run wider wheels and tires they give you a wider track WID for better handling and they look cool as heck plus we recently ruined Defenders on the Miata so I figured that was as good an excuse as any to get back to working on this thing but is installing fender flares really worth it cuz once you start cutting there's no going back today we're going to find out I'm Zach this is donut now the wheel and tire setup that we have on the Miata right now is about as much as we can run with the stock body it's a 15x 8 in wheel with a 205 width tire so if we want more width we're going to need to make more room and that's where fender flares come in so let's go take a look at what we got so in order to choose some fender flares I consulted with our resident Miata Maniac Jimmy Jimmy what'd you pick well right here we got some nice simple bolt-on autoc connection basic style fender flares oh yeah they're about 15 mm additional width that's from the rear the front I believe is 10 mm okay so these aren't very aggressive no no they're not but we still gain over half an inch of yes additional clearance it's just simple and it's it's tasteful yeah simple looks good on the car and these ones are actually made for the Miata there are a lot of flares that are like this that are just Universal but these are molded to the Miata yes obviously if you're trying to gain more width for your wheels you can also do wide body kit which is cool there's tons of really cool examples of Miatas with massive widebody kits and it looks great but it's going to cost you more money it's probably going to take you longer to acquire the kit a lot of pieces to install yeah so many pieces and you're replacing more of the car generally speaking so this will be relatively easy it should look great it'll get us a little bit more width mhm easy peasy lemon squeezy that's what I always say that was a weir I'm sorry I didn't know you were doing that all right first things first we need to replace these mashed up fenders with some fresh ones these things took a beating on the 100y year old Tire shoot oh sh my tires guts are coming out you can see where the wheels and tires are hitting the fender they're all mashed in so figur this is a good excuse to get some fresh ones you know we could probably bash those out and uh use the fenders that are already on there but you know I want to put a little love into this Miata and uh give her some new fenders God damn it wow brand new now that's nice Fender and then I think this is how this works my God sorry Jimmy dude's already trying to Dent the new fenders already my brother in Christ we're going to pull off the front bumper LIF that off we can get to the fender Hardware that we need to get to get the fenders on we've been through a lot all right that's enough messing around it's time to put these fenders on anytime you're replacing a body panel like these fenders there's going to be a little bit of fitment required obviously they'll go on but one of the things you're going to be paying attention to is like your panel gaps so right now I'm just kind of adjusting this thing to try to get this Gap to be even the whole way and it's pretty good but it opens up a little bit at the top here so you know we just loosen some Hardware push it around tighten it back up until we're happy with it could I get away with just slapping these on cutting them up and jamming the fender flares on yeah probably but you only get to do this one time this gets risky there's no turning back here we go hair loss stops with today's sponsor kees hi I'm Keith keeps have you been the victim of male pattern baldness or suffer from a receding hairline then click the link below and I'll get you the hairline you deserve at keeps we don't let faulty FAL hold you back our online licensed medical providers will help you fight for your hair goals we know what it takes to get clinically proven research back treatments delivered to your front door and unlike other hair loss firms keeps will get you everything you need at about half the cost of a traditional Pharmacy trust me I've been winning back hairline since 2018 18 and most recently got this trophy for my award-winning allnatural shampoo and conditioner system don't settle for less go to keeps.com Donut Media or click the link below right now to get a special offer you may be entitled to a full head of hair we got the new fenders on bumpers back on so now it's time to mock these things up we're basically going to kind of hold them figure out where we want them to sit then we're going to tape them in place faster Jimmy I'm getting tired oh Jimmy hurry up Jimmy tape it more tape Jimmy and then it's about time to drill some holes make some marks then get to cutting he's so confident he made me think that he's done it before so what I'm going to do is take the hardware then I'm going to use these little M6 button head Allen screws and I'm just going to kind of hover it in there to make sure that I get it sort of centered up in that divot there that little cutout and then from there when I'm happy with it I'll just Mark where the center of that was I got my automatic punch here and then that's where I'll drill no going back now buddy and then I'll drill through the fender flare and the fender at the same time then that'll make sure that when we go to marry the two together that they'll line up and actually be able to be installed okay what do you what do you need I'll just do it look good in your Tweed and all come on I'm here to help I'll do it for well did you even see like you got to Mark the holes and you drill the holes and Mar the line no big baby come here come here all right we Mark the holes okay now we'll make a mark down just past these holes so that we have steel under the flare so that we've got a spot to attach to we are about to make our cut and it's pretty important there's no turning back we have to do this one time on each side you have a lot of options in terms of tools for making a cut like this you could do it with the sawall you do it with a cut off wheel but what I'm going to use is this it's basically a mini sawall it's air powerered we've got a fine- Toth blade on it and this will help me make a really nice precise thin cut uh that's very clean you do need to have an air compressor to run it luckily we have one so like I said there's a lot of ways that you could do this this is what I've chosen kind of sounds like a fart oh sorry guys so make sure here we go vibrating so much I can barely like see it okay so the cuts made the holes are made now it's time to install our Riv nuts and we've talked about these on this channel before but we're to talk about them again because I love these things they are little threaded pieces of metal that correlate to different Hardware so these are M6 which means they fit M6 by 1 mm Hardware that's just the way you measure hardware and so the idea is that you punch a hole in sheet metal that these can drop flush into and then you take your Riv nut setting tool and you thread those threads in there onto the end here and then you squeeze it and you can see that pulls those threads in so when you do this with a tool the Riv nut itself gets squished it squeezes the back up and creates a back flange and makes a really nice tight fitting threaded hole that you can bolt stuff to so it's a nice way to do a fender flare install or a thousand other things anything you can think of where you need some threads and you're working in thin metal rib nuts are great another thing we're going to be using on this install is this stuff right here it's seam sealer the one we're using is por15 and basically I'm going to be using this to prevent rust in spots where we've got bare metal and all my little holes I'm just going to put put a dab of seam sealer on the riv nuts this stuff is going to be used a lot more at the rear you're going to have a lot more seam to seal it's like Venom dude wow hot dog hot dog hot you dog boy we got two whole fender flares on the easy ones are done it's going to be more of the same but the rear is a little bit more involved we're going to do the same marking that we did up front and then we're going to cut the skin just like we did up front but we've also got to deal with the inner Fender here we're going to have to cut the inside and the outside they're currently connected at the lip here and then we're going to have to weld them together so it's going to be a little bit more work but we get to weld stuff so that's fun beautiful cool and all you got to do is paint over the the tape y good to go done put a little super glue in there okay so we are ready to make a cut on the rear here and I think what I'm going to do is make a small cut first just to pull off the lip where the inner and outer panel are joined and then once they're separated we going to start to making our Cuts again you can't really easily replace what you cut off there's really no going back so you can always cut more but it's tough to cut less even if you have a welder it's a pain in the ass this is also one of those things that uh can really affect the resale value of your car in our case it's not that big of a deal because we're cutting off pretty beat up parts of the car but if you've got a mint conditioned car this gets risky but you know if you do it well I don't know do whatever you want resale got the major cuts out of the way now the next thing I'm going to do is Hammer this inner liner to meet up with the outer skin so I'm just kind of working my way around and getting it to stretch out and as you get one section closer the rest of it will kind of pull back down and you just keep going through that until the metal stretches out enough to all come up and meet the outer skin so I'm just kind of you know watching while I do it and uh making sure we're not going too far anywhere not messing up the body and it's looking pretty good the easiest way for me to trim a little bit of the excess off of this inner liner is going to be with this flap disc on an angle ground I'm worried about any Sparks hitting the uh fuel filler neck so I've got a wet towel on hand just going to cover up the filler door with that and if anything does happen to catch on fire we got that but I don't think you know I don't think anything's going to catch on fire we got both of the panels trimmed and pretty well fit together so now it's time to weld them together we're really just trying to seal this whole thing up so that water and debris can't get into the chassis so it's not like a structural Weld and that's a good thing because we're welding body panels which are very thin sheet metal uh and if you put a bunch of heat into them it's very easy to warp them so the way that we're going to weld this together is what's called Stitch welding it's basically just a bunch of tack welds spaced out so you're only putting a little bit of heat into an area at a time so I'll basically just hit one little weld move over here one little weld one little Weld and just keep going until the whole thing is welded up probably going to be porous to be honest uh doing it that way but that's fine because we've got that 415 seam sealer now again we're working near the gas tank and now we're welding so head on a swivel have your wet towel nearby and fire extinguisher okay going to goop this on real nasty like now that we've got our goop all gooped on and it's still wet we're going to go ahead and throw our rib nuts in I almost forgot we've got our fender flares pretty much done but we also got a front lip so we're going to put that on right now let's see what we got Jimmy tell me all about it what did you order okay so this is an AR speed OEM style front FP okay we were actually supposed to get these OEM front lips but we never got them in the Stak what a tragedy too low yeah well that's how you know they're cool especially with these Thunder flares now very cute and aggressive cute and aggressive that's exactly what we're looking for and you know it's going to feel nice giving this front lip to the Miata where it should have had it all along yes 30 Shades of Black by the end 30 Shades of Black that's a good point Eddie this thing is going to be all sorts of different shades of black but but we are going to try to fix that in the future uh we're going to wrap the car in the future something I've been avoiding for pretty much my whole life it seems like just brutal work but that's in the future today we got to get this lip installed now this this is a Miata wow back in the saddle again I'm back in the saddle again it's nice to be back on the Miata doing some work I feel a little bit reinvigorated she's got some new body parts and pieces yeah looks a little bit better this thing's always been really beat up and I've always dreamt of kind of fixing the body up this is a start yeah this is a start that kid literally look at your car look at your Fender Flare look at him see see he knows he got busted he got busted to take Jake over here okay we're both smiling so it's all good but is installing fender flares really worth it yeah you know it feels the exact same but I know that it looks a little bit better so sure right now it looks like a little bit of a hodge podge we got a bunch of Shades of Black going on yeah but uh that'll be fixed yeah that can be fixed and I think we will fix it woo well yeah so this has been a fun episode in the future I think uh some new wheels are probably in order and a little bit of wrap get this thing looking brand new what color I think you'll have to wait and see ooh but hey thank you guys so much for watching this episode I hope you learned a thing or two along the way hope you're excited to see the Miata back leave us a comment uh letting us know what else you want to see us do to it and uh don't forget to subscribe to the channel like the video throw it down any random comment whatever's in your Noggin throw it down there and uh we'll see you guys next time thank youtoday we're installing fender flares on the Miata you know what I'm talking about these things fender flares let you run wider wheels and tires they give you a wider track WID for better handling and they look cool as heck plus we recently ruined Defenders on the Miata so I figured that was as good an excuse as any to get back to working on this thing but is installing fender flares really worth it cuz once you start cutting there's no going back today we're going to find out I'm Zach this is donut now the wheel and tire setup that we have on the Miata right now is about as much as we can run with the stock body it's a 15x 8 in wheel with a 205 width tire so if we want more width we're going to need to make more room and that's where fender flares come in so let's go take a look at what we got so in order to choose some fender flares I consulted with our resident Miata Maniac Jimmy Jimmy what'd you pick well right here we got some nice simple bolt-on autoc connection basic style fender flares oh yeah they're about 15 mm additional width that's from the rear the front I believe is 10 mm okay so these aren't very aggressive no no they're not but we still gain over half an inch of yes additional clearance it's just simple and it's it's tasteful yeah simple looks good on the car and these ones are actually made for the Miata there are a lot of flares that are like this that are just Universal but these are molded to the Miata yes obviously if you're trying to gain more width for your wheels you can also do wide body kit which is cool there's tons of really cool examples of Miatas with massive widebody kits and it looks great but it's going to cost you more money it's probably going to take you longer to acquire the kit a lot of pieces to install yeah so many pieces and you're replacing more of the car generally speaking so this will be relatively easy it should look great it'll get us a little bit more width mhm easy peasy lemon squeezy that's what I always say that was a weir I'm sorry I didn't know you were doing that all right first things first we need to replace these mashed up fenders with some fresh ones these things took a beating on the 100y year old Tire shoot oh sh my tires guts are coming out you can see where the wheels and tires are hitting the fender they're all mashed in so figur this is a good excuse to get some fresh ones you know we could probably bash those out and uh use the fenders that are already on there but you know I want to put a little love into this Miata and uh give her some new fenders God damn it wow brand new now that's nice Fender and then I think this is how this works my God sorry Jimmy dude's already trying to Dent the new fenders already my brother in Christ we're going to pull off the front bumper LIF that off we can get to the fender Hardware that we need to get to get the fenders on we've been through a lot all right that's enough messing around it's time to put these fenders on anytime you're replacing a body panel like these fenders there's going to be a little bit of fitment required obviously they'll go on but one of the things you're going to be paying attention to is like your panel gaps so right now I'm just kind of adjusting this thing to try to get this Gap to be even the whole way and it's pretty good but it opens up a little bit at the top here so you know we just loosen some Hardware push it around tighten it back up until we're happy with it could I get away with just slapping these on cutting them up and jamming the fender flares on yeah probably but you only get to do this one time this gets risky there's no turning back here we go hair loss stops with today's sponsor kees hi I'm Keith keeps have you been the victim of male pattern baldness or suffer from a receding hairline then click the link below and I'll get you the hairline you deserve at keeps we don't let faulty FAL hold you back our online licensed medical providers will help you fight for your hair goals we know what it takes to get clinically proven research back treatments delivered to your front door and unlike other hair loss firms keeps will get you everything you need at about half the cost of a traditional Pharmacy trust me I've been winning back hairline since 2018 18 and most recently got this trophy for my award-winning allnatural shampoo and conditioner system don't settle for less go to keeps.com Donut Media or click the link below right now to get a special offer you may be entitled to a full head of hair we got the new fenders on bumpers back on so now it's time to mock these things up we're basically going to kind of hold them figure out where we want them to sit then we're going to tape them in place faster Jimmy I'm getting tired oh Jimmy hurry up Jimmy tape it more tape Jimmy and then it's about time to drill some holes make some marks then get to cutting he's so confident he made me think that he's done it before so what I'm going to do is take the hardware then I'm going to use these little M6 button head Allen screws and I'm just going to kind of hover it in there to make sure that I get it sort of centered up in that divot there that little cutout and then from there when I'm happy with it I'll just Mark where the center of that was I got my automatic punch here and then that's where I'll drill no going back now buddy and then I'll drill through the fender flare and the fender at the same time then that'll make sure that when we go to marry the two together that they'll line up and actually be able to be installed okay what do you what do you need I'll just do it look good in your Tweed and all come on I'm here to help I'll do it for well did you even see like you got to Mark the holes and you drill the holes and Mar the line no big baby come here come here all right we Mark the holes okay now we'll make a mark down just past these holes so that we have steel under the flare so that we've got a spot to attach to we are about to make our cut and it's pretty important there's no turning back we have to do this one time on each side you have a lot of options in terms of tools for making a cut like this you could do it with the sawall you do it with a cut off wheel but what I'm going to use is this it's basically a mini sawall it's air powerered we've got a fine- Toth blade on it and this will help me make a really nice precise thin cut uh that's very clean you do need to have an air compressor to run it luckily we have one so like I said there's a lot of ways that you could do this this is what I've chosen kind of sounds like a fart oh sorry guys so make sure here we go vibrating so much I can barely like see it okay so the cuts made the holes are made now it's time to install our Riv nuts and we've talked about these on this channel before but we're to talk about them again because I love these things they are little threaded pieces of metal that correlate to different Hardware so these are M6 which means they fit M6 by 1 mm Hardware that's just the way you measure hardware and so the idea is that you punch a hole in sheet metal that these can drop flush into and then you take your Riv nut setting tool and you thread those threads in there onto the end here and then you squeeze it and you can see that pulls those threads in so when you do this with a tool the Riv nut itself gets squished it squeezes the back up and creates a back flange and makes a really nice tight fitting threaded hole that you can bolt stuff to so it's a nice way to do a fender flare install or a thousand other things anything you can think of where you need some threads and you're working in thin metal rib nuts are great another thing we're going to be using on this install is this stuff right here it's seam sealer the one we're using is por15 and basically I'm going to be using this to prevent rust in spots where we've got bare metal and all my little holes I'm just going to put put a dab of seam sealer on the riv nuts this stuff is going to be used a lot more at the rear you're going to have a lot more seam to seal it's like Venom dude wow hot dog hot dog hot you dog boy we got two whole fender flares on the easy ones are done it's going to be more of the same but the rear is a little bit more involved we're going to do the same marking that we did up front and then we're going to cut the skin just like we did up front but we've also got to deal with the inner Fender here we're going to have to cut the inside and the outside they're currently connected at the lip here and then we're going to have to weld them together so it's going to be a little bit more work but we get to weld stuff so that's fun beautiful cool and all you got to do is paint over the the tape y good to go done put a little super glue in there okay so we are ready to make a cut on the rear here and I think what I'm going to do is make a small cut first just to pull off the lip where the inner and outer panel are joined and then once they're separated we going to start to making our Cuts again you can't really easily replace what you cut off there's really no going back so you can always cut more but it's tough to cut less even if you have a welder it's a pain in the ass this is also one of those things that uh can really affect the resale value of your car in our case it's not that big of a deal because we're cutting off pretty beat up parts of the car but if you've got a mint conditioned car this gets risky but you know if you do it well I don't know do whatever you want resale got the major cuts out of the way now the next thing I'm going to do is Hammer this inner liner to meet up with the outer skin so I'm just kind of working my way around and getting it to stretch out and as you get one section closer the rest of it will kind of pull back down and you just keep going through that until the metal stretches out enough to all come up and meet the outer skin so I'm just kind of you know watching while I do it and uh making sure we're not going too far anywhere not messing up the body and it's looking pretty good the easiest way for me to trim a little bit of the excess off of this inner liner is going to be with this flap disc on an angle ground I'm worried about any Sparks hitting the uh fuel filler neck so I've got a wet towel on hand just going to cover up the filler door with that and if anything does happen to catch on fire we got that but I don't think you know I don't think anything's going to catch on fire we got both of the panels trimmed and pretty well fit together so now it's time to weld them together we're really just trying to seal this whole thing up so that water and debris can't get into the chassis so it's not like a structural Weld and that's a good thing because we're welding body panels which are very thin sheet metal uh and if you put a bunch of heat into them it's very easy to warp them so the way that we're going to weld this together is what's called Stitch welding it's basically just a bunch of tack welds spaced out so you're only putting a little bit of heat into an area at a time so I'll basically just hit one little weld move over here one little weld one little Weld and just keep going until the whole thing is welded up probably going to be porous to be honest uh doing it that way but that's fine because we've got that 415 seam sealer now again we're working near the gas tank and now we're welding so head on a swivel have your wet towel nearby and fire extinguisher okay going to goop this on real nasty like now that we've got our goop all gooped on and it's still wet we're going to go ahead and throw our rib nuts in I almost forgot we've got our fender flares pretty much done but we also got a front lip so we're going to put that on right now let's see what we got Jimmy tell me all about it what did you order okay so this is an AR speed OEM style front FP okay we were actually supposed to get these OEM front lips but we never got them in the Stak what a tragedy too low yeah well that's how you know they're cool especially with these Thunder flares now very cute and aggressive cute and aggressive that's exactly what we're looking for and you know it's going to feel nice giving this front lip to the Miata where it should have had it all along yes 30 Shades of Black by the end 30 Shades of Black that's a good point Eddie this thing is going to be all sorts of different shades of black but but we are going to try to fix that in the future uh we're going to wrap the car in the future something I've been avoiding for pretty much my whole life it seems like just brutal work but that's in the future today we got to get this lip installed now this this is a Miata wow back in the saddle again I'm back in the saddle again it's nice to be back on the Miata doing some work I feel a little bit reinvigorated she's got some new body parts and pieces yeah looks a little bit better this thing's always been really beat up and I've always dreamt of kind of fixing the body up this is a start yeah this is a start that kid literally look at your car look at your Fender Flare look at him see see he knows he got busted he got busted to take Jake over here okay we're both smiling so it's all good but is installing fender flares really worth it yeah you know it feels the exact same but I know that it looks a little bit better so sure right now it looks like a little bit of a hodge podge we got a bunch of Shades of Black going on yeah but uh that'll be fixed yeah that can be fixed and I think we will fix it woo well yeah so this has been a fun episode in the future I think uh some new wheels are probably in order and a little bit of wrap get this thing looking brand new what color I think you'll have to wait and see ooh but hey thank you guys so much for watching this episode I hope you learned a thing or two along the way hope you're excited to see the Miata back leave us a comment uh letting us know what else you want to see us do to it and uh don't forget to subscribe to the channel like the video throw it down any random comment whatever's in your Noggin throw it down there and uh we'll see you guys next time thank you