On Wednesday, I had the whole day off to work on the car. I was determined to get the grilles and stone shield (grille surround) installed. It took a good portion of a whole day to do. It involved alot of fabricating, bending, grinding, swearing, heating, melting, bending, drilling, parts and hardware searching, etc. I don't want to go into too much detail and crash anyone's server, but I've got to tell about the melting part.
I installed the plastic headlight frames first. It was fairly straightforward, they fit decent. The passenger side is a repro, bought at the same time as the center shield. The driver side is an original, because no repro was available at the time. It wasn't broken, so I used it anyway, and painted it and all the other parts the same day as the car. Wisely, I bolted the grilles to the radiator support without attempting to fit the center piece first to test the fit. I wanted to know what the relationship between the outside edges of the grilles and the plastic headlight surrounds was going to be like. The repro passenger side fit excellent. The driver side, not so much. The hole for the tab was broken away. I drilled two tiny holes and made a piece of wire into a loop to receive the grille tab. The wire was too thick. I also ended up grinding the back edges of both grilles due to bent edges and factory casting burrs. These Supreme grilles are metal. They are heavy, and I wanted to be sure everything fit right so nothing got broken.
Since it was old and warped, the driver side headlight bezel did not line up with the edge of the grille. I taped a yardstick to the fender as shown, then bolted the grille in by itself. I determined the front edge of the bezel needed to move to the right about 3/4 of an inch. I removed the grille, and then I ended up heating the back side of the headlight bezel with a propane torch. I was worried about bubbling the paint or cracking the plastic, but I got lucky and it didn't happen. In order to get the plastic soft enough to move, and stay in place, I had to heat it enough to catch the backside of it on fire! As soon as it started to turn black, I blew out the fire and held the front edge about an inch to the right, using the taped yardstick as a guide. When the plastic cooled, I released the edge and it stayed in place, right where I wanted it.
Hours later, after dark, I had the grilles installed for real, all bolts and screws proper, in place and tightened. I don't have the center brackets to help finish the front bumper alignment, so I may have to make them. I installed a repro gas tank earlier, and had been running the car from a can this whole time. Late tonight I finally poured a few gallons into the real tank and hooked the fuel line back to the car and did away with the gas can.
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