No rubbing!

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As I've mentioned elsewhere in this site, the addition of 285/75R16 Goodyear MT/R tires caused them to rub against the rear of the fender well.  Take a look:

tire-rub-1.jpg (72218 bytes)

To eliminate the rub, you either need smaller tires, or to get rid of that annoying little hump.  I chose the latter.  Upon checking, it turns out that hump is just filling up valuable space in the well.  There isn't anything behind it, so time to flatten it out.  Click on the below pics for more details:

sheetmetal-before.jpg (67109 bytes)    behind-metal.jpg (85739 bytes)    behind-metal2.jpg (69101 bytes)
The first photo shows the metal behind the plastic.  The last two show underneath the rig.  See how it is "bent" for no good reason?

Some people just take to this hump with a hammer, but I was concerned about irregularities if I did that (it must be the engineer in me), so I decided to make a cut along the bottom of the hump with a cut-off wheel (I used a RotoZip cutting disc), push the sheet metal in, put the plastic back, do the same thing, but heat the plastic cut when done and "weld" the plastic back together with the heat gun.  Here's how it turned out (click on the thumnail for a larger image):

sheetmetal-after.jpg (72389 bytes)    sheetmetal-after2.jpg (80679 bytes)    no-rubbing.jpg (69970 bytes)
(Note:  After the last picture was taken, I heated an turned in the corner of the cladding that is shown so close in the last picture)

That's it.  No more rubbing.  The whole thing took me about an hour and a half.