I took a trip over to Mack’s Mega-superstore today for a spot of shopping as I was looking to procure a rear fender, I was in luck as I struck gold on the ground floor in the form of an old trailer mud guard, steel construction and in excellent condition.

It’s a bit of an odd shape as the curves on the edges dont match, one side is pretty sweet but the other side is quite flat, ideal for attaching to your custom hotrod trailer but not ideal for a motorcycle fender.

It’s roughly the right shape so well worth customising to make a fender, I’m an avid fan of both OCC and American hotrod so I’m qualified to do the work, I’ve seen it done many times and it looks easy.

The wheel measures about 140mm wide so I marked out the mudguard a bit off centre so both halves would measure about 160mm when put together.

I set to work with my trusty angle grinder and followed the line to lop it in half, found the midway point and cut the part in to two sections to be nailed back together to form the fender.

Started tacking it in to one piece but it’s very mis-shapen, not due to me getting it hot or even cutting off the line, it’s just a bit of a rough part to start with, just how we like’em.

Now welded all the way from end to end, the next job is to minimise the welds with a flap wheel and try to beat it in to some kind of a nice looking shape, I dont have an English wheel but my dad does have a hammer with a flat head so I’ll get that and try to straighten it against something soft.

Well as luck would have it my dad has a few of these ‘fancy’ hammers so I bundled up some leather gloves and a lump of wood and started beating it in to shape, didn’t take long and it starts to look pretty good.

I’ve propped it in place to get a first look at possition and figure out how to mount it, should be fairly straight forward, I’ll make a plate to attach at the bottom as I’ve left the bottom tube unwelded so I can slide it in to possition, not sure about the top mounts yet but I might try to sneak some brass in if I can.