nem you're a gold mine, but I'm going to have to have you over soon to talk things over in depth and before making a decision. time to whip out the sharpies and graffiti the back of the garage door. too much for me to go through in the build thread without it going on for pages and pages.
next bit that I've been working on and off on between a few different projects. extensions for the upper rad support to cover the backs of the headlights. this will mean the entire upper rad support is the same width as the new centre section and some uglyness behind the light will be covered up. in terms of the actual process I started with a rectangular piece of 15 gauge (1.8mm) mild steel and slowly bent it to suit. this was actually a much more complex shape than I initially thought and by the end of it there were a good 25 or so bends. also not to plan was my inability to bend this stuff by hand, haha. to overcome this I traced out a straight line on the back of the panel where I wanted to bend it, then ran a cutting disk back and forth along said line a few times to thin the metal. it then bent exactly where I wanted with ease at first the plan was to work from the rad support towards the headlight, until I realised it would be ten fold easier to work back from the only straight edge (underneath the headlight weatherstrip) rather than to create one. the back of the headlight had have as much height taken off as possible. this including removal of the top weatherstrip retaining bracket with workaround devised, cutting down some a sizeable amount of glass below it and converting the underside mounting brackets from studs to nuts. the latter means the headlights can be slid straight in without having to lift the front section to slot through the pair of studs. every little bit helps, it's a tight fit. with one side completed this piece will now be flattened out and used as a mirror template for the other side. it will then be reformed, back welded for strength and additional thickness then ground down topside to hide the obvious fold lines. it can of course finally be welded into the car. i'll have to get a photo with some more distance to show the overall look. i am very happy with it. -A
also made up a new brake master cylinder brace. it's welded into my strut tower. this started off as a solid steel rod, cut down and shaped to size drilled and tapped for an M8 bolt and welded in alongside the strut bracing. all bare metal at this stage. the hole from the brace was drilled through to the wheel well to allow more bolt wind in clearance. tightened all the way in this allows for just enough space for the master cylinder to be removed. still have a long way to go with my welding before it's something I can be proud of. -A
Nice mate, your doing a great job especialy as your pretty much self taught. Attitude and motivation, you have these 2 things and you can achieve anything.
thanks dude. the welding side of things is pretty frustration but I guess it's a necessary stepping stone.
Putting lots of time into this car at the moment and loving it. When I am, I am more focused on just one piece of work at a time rather than hopping from unfinished mod to unfinished mod, which means more progress. Upper front end is all welded up now and is most of the way through body soldering and priming, first part of the shell to be so. wowzers. With the driver's side headlight housing cover done, I flattened it out and made a mirrored template for the passenger side. Back cut, bent up, trimmed to suit. Unfortunately in the end despite my best efforts I was unable to make the covers from one piece of material. After I was finally happy with the positioning the two innermost sections were made separately as the original pieces turned out too small You can see the new portion tack welded in place. funny talking point in my garage is the gold plated magnets I use to hold metalwork in place. they are disconcertingly strong, left over from a home made rail gun project of mine when I was a kid, haha. Back welded (and top where necessary) and ground down The passenger side headlight was welded in first. hugely satisfying after all the work to actually start the final welding! getting better with the mig One of the parts of the front end seal up project was that I had to make a custom hood latch lever as the original unfortunately fouled on the new metalwork. Things you never could have called yourself doing when you buy a car... Chop chop, had to redrill the locating spring for said lever and mount it further inboard too. New lever was cut from the same box section steel that I made the front tower supports from. welded up, clears now and is reachable. not sure what to do about final shaping at this point. suggestions are welcome? as you can see, once the covers were welded in and ground back I back welded the underside for some extra strength. So next up... digging out the lead work. I'm sort of getting the hang of it - it's all about heat modulation. There's a small window between the lead filler being not hot enough and crumbling under force and too hot and simply running. workable temperature is reportedly between 180 and 250*C. When working the filler down, filing 100% is the go. Cuts through more material faster and the chunks coming off are too large to be airborne which is a plus (poisonous and such). sharp eyes can see where the transition between filler lead and steel below. Finally, after a final skim coat with regular body filler to make it 100%, PRIMER. P-R-I-M-E-RRRRR. Like I said about the timing covers, best high fill cover ever. Despite trying very hard to just finish the complete front end, with the arrival of my second set of coil packs I just couldn't keep my hands of mounting them, haha. the coil packs in question are SR20 Splitfires. Looking to no longer mount the coil packs on the plenum the SR units seemed like a good solution, and I figured why not go the extra mile for the after market versions. Don't want any spark issues with the big boost setup. Now unfortunately despite sitting so well on the factory spark plug guides, in that position the coils fail to reach the plugs. So next up was dropping the height of the coils. The initial plan was to open up the guide, drop the coil 20mm or so, sleeve the hole with some doner piping that the coil pack skirt would seal up against the ID of and plastic weld/smooth it over topside. the guides are well sealed up for a reason - no material dropping down near the plug that could fall into the combustion chamber during a service, so it was important to maintain this seal. Unfortunately I don't have a drill press, so I made a little jig to keep the hole saw centred. fitting the guide up to get an idea... uh oh. piping sleeve is going to foul on the cam covers. this is why we test fit! After a bit of head scratching including and not limited to contemplating flap wheeling out the covers, I realised the coil pack doesn't have to be dropped as low as planned. in fact it looked like it could be positioned so the rubber skirt was flush with the top of the guide, saving any sleeving. it's mad when you work out a new solution that is way way way less work. Cutting out a new guide with the perfect 46.2mm hole saw, was pretty lucky I had that lying around haha. This meant getting pretty close to the seams the seals are mounted through, so some scrap secured with my super magnets (through the plastic) made sure everything stayed in tact as I did my thing with the grinder. The tops of the tubes were then cleaned up with the most adorable little file you've ever seen All fitted up. coming together, at this point just waiting on my nutsert tool to arrive after the nutserts themselves and aluminium to machine into crush tubes arrived on my door step today. Will be a bolt in affair once all the bits are here. The rubber skirts of the coil packs are hard up against the ID's of the freshly drilled holes and seal well. mock up motor is serving super useful. That's where the car's at now. Soon I'll be finishing off the headlight housing covers and have the upper front end completely done. I'll then polish off the frame rails (all welded and grinded at this point, just need filler skim then prime) and probably tops of strut towers next. Something I've learned with this project is that when it comes to learning new skills and putting them into practice is this; start with the easy stuff and tackle the harder areas with the skills you picked up working said simpler parts. Lead filling near vertical body seams is borderline impossible for a newbie, but the heat modulation methods I picked up doing the (horizontal) front end is going to make a night and day difference. The less times you say "**** this" and call it a day way too early, the faster the work gets done. That's what matters! Lastly, after a month or so of pondering various ideas on how to get my radiator out of view and dealing with the unsightly fan shroud, I concluded this: 'til next time, -A
Damn i love this thread, ive done the same with the Bonnet hinge panel and was eyeing off to do the Headlight panel but im a noob with the Headlights and wasnt sure on which were the adjusters or not. And then the case with getting bolt access for Headlight removal. Great stuff bud!...I wish i could keep up!!
Man thats some sweet progress. Bonnet latch handle will look a bit unsightly though with all the work you've done. Why not move it someplace out of view?
With the lead wiping are you using any sort of flux. When I did a bit of lead wiping, on an older car, I had a block that I used and it acted like flux. Its all a bit like soldering, you use a decent flux to etch the surface and you get a nice joint.:zlove:
The headlights are unbolted from the underside, so no problems with removal there though. To adjust the beam angle however they will have to be removed but how often is that carried out. Did you make a new bonnet lever? Cheers Ryan. I'm open to suggestions on how to hide it. It's not like I can reach through the gap above the nose panel anymore hah. I am using a painted on flux, came with the kit I bought. I wouldn't go this brand again though, the filler sticks are a solid 1" wide and eat up heaps of heat before becoming workable. All the demo videos I've watched feature ~10cm round rods that look much easier to use.
Finished up mounting the plug guides. Nutsert tool and crush tube material arrived and hopped straight on it. Gotta say, nutserts are fantastic. I managed to snap one of the guides in a pretty repairable spot which meant starting again from scratch with a spare but eh... set backs are a necessary step before reaching your goal. Ordered some solid 12mm aluminium rod to cut up and make into crush tubes. I use some genuine old school blacksmith cast iron tongs for handling material when hot, haha. Still waiting on some hex key button head bolts to finish it all off nicely. Super happy with these, came together like they were factory. -A
Yeah my bonnet hinge and the upper brace that runs underneath were chromed before i thought the Radiator panel addition right the way through. Nice spark plug guides! ...I have the split fires and I've done much the same as you,...drilled holes in the same places where you have as well lol ...As well as drilled holes at the end of the spark plug guides where the plastic tab thingy's are at the rear of the engine. ...Im running wiring through their for other purposes : )
Upper front end is all finished up. Done, caput, finito, set and forget. Good feeling to have part of the bay done and ready for paint! Driver's side was tackled first. Body soldered, filed, soldered, filed, filed, filed, filler skim coat, sand, skim coat, sand, sand, sand, high fill. with all that said and done I wasn't entirely happy with the outcome first time around; sorry for the shitty photo. as you can see, there was a very visible dip present through the transition from OEM to aftermarket metalwork. after looking at it from many angles (none of which left me any more satisfied) I cracked on with the passenger side, determined to go at it a different way. Layering on the lead here. after a bit of practise this is how the raw filler looks, being applied by blowtorch and roughly shaped with wooden paddles. the excess is then filed down and finally smoothed with high grit sand paper. Hard work but if in 1000 years the remains of my car are found, these leaded components will likely be all that's discernible. much better a wire wheel made short work of the high fill and bog and I redid the driver's side shortly after. and there you have it, custom upper front end finished. I am very happy with it. Some time down the track as a cherry on top I want to close off the ridge in the underside of the nose panel (visible in the last photo) and have it flush with the metalwork. Silly to have that little detail off after all that work. Next up I'll polish off the (already fully welded/ground down) frame rails then tops of fenderwells and strut towers. They're the easy ones I can knock out while figuring out how to attack the rest. -A
Awesome work you should be proud. Lead filling is epic old school love it. I hope this thing is still Registered?
