[37ford4dr]

nibbled some more today on the elphant (about 2.5 hours)....i think i have decide to replace the entire wheel well and use the lap seam on the side of the inner wheel well. this will give me no unusual seams on the inner fender. the inner wheel wells that i have are from a later model year and have different stamped indentations, so i think i will just the entire inner fender at this point and use factory seams








i fitted a ply wood radiator for ridigity and wire brushed the valance and inner wheel wells

[37ford4dr]

I needed to do some clean up in the garage and needed a quick hit on the car, so i grabbed the seats and did some work on them. i cut the old seat tracks off and welded a repair piece into the rail on one so we could wire brush it.

[37ford4dr]

some more light work today.....i am making templates of the seats to figure how to make the roadster seats into coupe seats. really no surprises both the roadster seat frames and the coupe leather seat covers appear to me mirror images of each other. what i am missing is the height measurement of the coupe seat. i dont think i will have a problem cutting the frame tubes and making the seat backs to have the same curve but i really need the height measurement of the internal two vertical supports.

[37ford4dr]

well no guts no glory....lets mock this thing up. from all of the templates it looks like if i make mirror images of both short sides i will be really close





i cut a 1" piece of the solid stock to use as a locating pin


i used a wood pipe clamp to pull the sides together


i decided to make the sides the same size and will use the outside measurement of the tape measure since there are no weld beads to interfere with the measurement


i used an axial clamp ( thks to Santa) to make sure the tube aligns properly



here you can see where i tacked the out side bend and this is with the two seat backs next to each other



and heres the final mock up all tack welded up.

[37ford4dr]

thks Eric, well today MGACharlie came over and we had a nice visit. i finished the coupe seat conversions and primed the drivers side inner sills and worked on the front shroud some


heres the finished seat back



the primed sills





and now for the shroud work i am straightening it out a little bit at a time


heres the pattern



heres the tool a piece of angle iron with a handle welded on it




heres a low spot that has been hammer formed by slipping it under the radiator duct valance and hammering it,






i worked on this for a little while and you can see it start to un wrinkle itself, the idea is to work it a little bit at a time in the reverse order the damage handled

[37ford4dr]

i was thinking about this and just needed to go back out and play some more, unfortunately earlier today i found out that my camera doesnt give me a warning when the memory is full and the photos stop getting saved. So a lot of the before pictures are gone but lets try and reconstruct

here if you look closely you can see where the bottom of the flange is pushed up towards the radiator duct valance




so the idea is to figure out a way to apply the least amount of force to get it to come back to shape. sometimes you just have to play with setups to get the results you want. so there is a large 5x5 angle iron on the inside and then other angle iron on the out side so my lever only moves the piece of metal that i want to deflect. and my radiused hammer form is clamped so the lever is rocking against that so i dont distort the radiator duct valance

idea is to lever the piece down










and the final result

[37ford4dr]

yes we are into rebirthing old cars.... just call me FrankenBob....

the front end needs a little bit of massaging and inorder for me to have a complete picture I ground out the thin layer of bondo that was added from a previous repair.



not sure if you can see but it almost likes like the area was brazed at one time




a small tear



some more bondo








all in all its in really good shape and will require just a small amount of TLC

[37ford4dr]

I think the best you can do is to try and minimize the skim coat and make it as smooth as possible by using a dolly and hammmer

some bites of the elphant



hard to see but this is the the correct dimension and pretty flat



use templates for judging correctness





cut out the bent piece and will replace it with a butt seamed flat piece

[37ford4dr]

I have been asked how do I weld thin metals together with out getting burn through on the rusty piece so I paid attention to my techniques on this....the repair panel is 20ga and the old radiator valance is very thin

so I am using my mig welder like a tig and oxy actelyene set up.....the trick is to create a puddle of molten metal and then tease it and move it around with the feeding Mig wire going from side to side to bridge any gaps. so I use this technique as soon as it starts to get a burn through. if you look at this you can see where there are nice clean welds and then you see some piles of metal that I created to bridge gaps. Metal doesnt care how it gets created and grinding stuff down makes it all smooth again...

[37ford4dr]

a couple more bites of the elephant in the snowy weather





use a backing plate of copper and lots of small welds this is very very thin.....MIG with .025 wire set to lowest setting and feed of 3.5







all ground down , use a flash light on the back sode to make sure there are no small holes

[37ford4dr]

this project should give every body hope for their cars....I think the key is to have honest expectations of what the end product is going to look like....you know "its hard to make a silk purse out of a sows ear". I am pretty sure I am going to make this into a period style vintage racer that way the battle scars will look right in line...I dont get too wound up in having everything just the way it came from the factory....that I can tell you drives some Corvette guys nuts, so to the purists I will apologize in advance.

I only have pictures of half of the nose repair areas I must have gotten too busy and forgot to take pictures of the other side








so out comes the MIG .025 wire and settings A and B wire feed 3 to 4.25

heres the rough welding





before it gets ground down

[37ford4dr]

two hours tonight peeling back the layer of steel that was spot welded to the inner fender. I used a grinder to grind the spot welds and then peeled the layer off like opening a can.





i used the channel locks to coil up the layer i was removing



here you can see the grinds on the spot welds, all you have to do is hit the metal with the grinder and indentation will show you where the spot weld is.




and a finished side



two finished sides

[37ford4dr]

another 2 hrs of work



same process grind the metal and the spot weld divet indentation shows up and then grind and peel away








again I take this seriously











in case any body ever wanted to see some unusual shots

[37ford4dr]

I was thinking about how I am going to make the splice work and I came up with this idea.

I cut the inner frame support from the bonnet



then trimmed it



slipped it inside the support and made it two





and did a test fit

[496CHEVY3100]

Is that a cb 450