Was hoping someone who has adjusted the fender(s) on his or her Firebird could lend me some advice! The driver's side fender on my '89 Formula needs to be realigned slightly -- it sits about 1/4 inch too far back (toward the door). This is causing the front clip to also sit too far back on that side, so the headlight door bezel doesn't clear the fascia, and the hood is resting on the forward lip of the nose and causing it to not quite shut all the way on the driver's side. Looks ugly.

The complete '89 Helm shop manual is en route to me right now via priority mail, but until it gets here all I have is the third gen Chilton book. According to it, there's a lot of disassembly required to remove the fender outright, but if all I want to do is bump it about a 1/4-inch forward, what's absolutely necessary? Do I still need to remove the hood? Do I have to take the front clip off? Or can I simply loosen all the mounting bolts / tabs on the top and bottom and nudge the fender (and in turn, the front clip) forward a little?

Thanks in advance for the help!

 

first thing you need to do is deterimine if the frame is bent of not. If the frame was bent from and accident and the previous owner put the car togheter without fixing it then you will have parts that will not line up. In order to move the fender foward, you must move the bumper cover foward and the cover has no foaward and back adjustment. the cover snaps to the bumper support with snaps to the metal bumper which bolts to the frame rails. The rails must be straight for everything to line up correctly.

 

Crap. The misalignment is very very slight but it's enough to account for somebody striking something with the front of the car at low speed -- the apex of the front clip is cracked, and the metal impact rail behind it is torn in the center as if something low-to-the-ground ripped through it. It could have bent the frame just enough to push the front clip and fender back I suppose.

The car has a LOT of miles and I am the fourth owner, so who knows what could have done this. Looks like I may be having a professional evaluate this one. Bah! Every "probably minor" issue I encounter with this car ends up ballooning into something bigger...goes with the territory, I guess!

 

first place is on the top of the fender and there are about 5-7 bolts. this wil let yuo do 2 things, slide forward or slide te fender out to line with the rest of the body.
the other adj is that strip that runs the inside lip of the nise where the hood recesses. this can be pulled forward or back. the other adj in this area is the light door. the outter bracket lets yuo move it forward or back, the inner bracket lets you move it to the left and right. just infront if the inner bracket is another bolt that lets things move the door forward or back as well. under the outside light door bracket there is one more adj that lets the up and down adj of the door be made.
the other adj that can be made is the hood, it can be slid around a good bit in all 4 directions to help adj.
and the last place i can think of is the hood hing adj where it bolts to the hood. the bolts that hold the hinges double as fender bolts.
my best sugguestion would be to take a few hrs on a sat and observe what each adj does and play with it. this is exactly what i did on my formula. it worked our pretty well.
good luck and give an update.

 

Thanks Richard! Last night I started thinking along those lines too -- even if the frame is slightly bent, it's so slight that I should be able to compensate by adjusting everything else around it. The hood needs to come back about a quarter inch, and the headlight door will probably have to come with it, but that's all I really need to do.

I have today off anyhow, so my dad and I are going to look at it and see what we can accomplish. I'll let everybody know!

According to the USPS, I should get my Helm manual today...I'm so excited...

 

when i hadta fix my 83 T/A i found donor parts and with a sligtly pushed in header support it came out amaizingy stright with those adjustments.

 

Solved the problem!

While my front clip is still the cause of the trouble -- it's slightly misaligned, due to who knows what behind it -- I was able to compensate by moving the hood and the driver's side headlamp door back a bit.

First I loosened the bolts that attach the hood supports to the hood itself and nudged the hood back just over 1/8th of an inch. I also loosened the bolts where the hood supports attach to the fenders and pushed the whole assembly toward the back as well, got about another 1/8th of an inch of clearance that way. The headlight bezel still doesn't quite clear the front clip despite my moving it as far back as I could get it (the latter is bowed upward; somebody must have hit something with it) but the overall effect is MUCH better now.

Before:


After:


It's not a cure for the cause of the problem, but the effect is the same and it's good enough for me!

Thanks for the help -- I appreciate it!

 

hey that does look better. plat with the adjs on the light doors and you can get the door lids level with the hood like from the factory.
BTW ,VERY nice looking formula!!!
i drool everytime i open my sales brochure and see the page giving all the details on the formula.
yours looks good and black usually shows the worst when our paint goes bad.

 

Thanks for the complements! I see you have a Formula as well -- I think they have become my favorite third-gen Firebird flavor. Originally I wanted a GTA but something about the T/A aero package turned me off. I like the cleaner lines of the Formula (and the earlier third-gen T/As).

My paint is actually very bad, but the car always looks great in pictures. I just bought the car in October and the previous owner had his friend paint it recently. Really crappy job -- but I'm going to have it redone right once I get the car where I want it to be mechanically.

I've got a whole new set of tools coming on Saturday so I can really dive in and play around some more -- I'm sure I'll keep tweaking the alignment of everything till I'm happy with it!

Thanks again!