New Years resolutions down the tube

This year's resolution was to write every day. If you go back to my last couple blog posts you can see I was doing a pretty good job. I wrote a lot of stuff I didn't post too. Then March hit and everything ground to a halt. Its hard to explain why but a really crappy winter with no snow didn't help. Whats surprising is that when I'm busier I actually find time to get more done, when times are slow I get lazy...
In April we had a layoff at work and a couple close coworkers got the axe. That effected me more than I like to admit and made me even lazier.

So anyway its been mostly a summer off, here's something to get us back into the swing:

Angie's 2005 Volkswagen Golf has ugly front fenders, the driver's side especially. It looks like somebody backed into it just forward of the driver's door which caused the lip above the wheel to pooch out. I bought a pair of used fenders from a junkyard that were supposed to be A0 condition. A means good and 0 is supposed to mean zero defects. When I got them I found this:

Of course its the driver's side thats in worse shape.
First I removed the rust:

The bucket is full of citric acid, this is a trick I learned from lanterns and is the same system I used last year on the Dietz wick lantern. It took a couple days before they were completely rust free. Fortunately there was only rust in that corner, it'd have been annoying to build a tub to soak the whole fender.

I welded a patch over the hole which is hidden by the firewall anyway, then I fiberglassed over the whole thing. The fiberglass smooths everything out and covers the weld which is likely to rust otherwise.

Two cans of color match paint came from Paintscratch.com, I like their spray nozzles but one of the two cans was considerably better than the other. Unfortunately I used that can first. I had to paint the welded section a couple times because I didn't do a good enough job getting the patch perfectly smooth first. I should have scrapped the paint down on the whole fender, then primed and painted but I was trying to go quick and as usual ended up wasting a bunch of time and paint.

You can see the primer on the effected corner. I've already put color on the whole fender which is why it looks dull.
As of today I've got color and clear coat on the whole thing. The clear coat is terrible, it orange peeled like crazy, was very hard to get a solid coat down, like the paint was too thick in the can. I need another can of color but I'm going to try my local Fischer Autoparts and see if they can do better...