Tuesday, December 7, 2021

Bonnet repairs

 Now for the bonnet repairs. I had previously stripped off the old paint and bondo, and sprayed with cheap rustoleum primer to arrest further rust while it was waiting to be worked on. But there were still the dents, holes, and surface rust to deal with. Some of the rust was deep and had to be ground out and etched with phosphoric acid to get into the deep pits. Additional metal straightening and welding of old holes was done.

Next, the bonnet is skim coated with Dura Glass filler which is sanded down to about 1mm average. Some spots are a bit thicker. But the bonnet gets a lot of flexing, so the Dura Glass covering the larger area like this reduces the possibility of cracking or showing the transitions between filler to metal. Corners of the wings are matched to the bonnet edge, and the panel gap lines are getting fine tuned





 

The front body work continues

 While getting the wings fitted and tightened down it was also necessary to begin fitting the bonnet and valance. These all need to be adjusted relative to one another.
The grille was bent up from the old collision and never straightened properly, so it had to be straightened to nominal order before attempting to do the panel fitting. It still needs detailed restorative work.

 
At this point I found that the repairs to the front area of the wings needed further work to match up with the bonnet and the recessed grille trim. This involved some re-welding on the left wing, and some filling.
 


 The new BMH valance is a poor fit where the holes are punched. All of the outboard holes were mis-placed, and not the same or symmetrical from the left to thte right sides. I had to enlarge most holes and completely re-drill some. The extra holes will have to be filled in.