Page Fourteen – The Snoz

It’s been a while and work has been done, it’s just that it’s kind of boring. Important, but boring.

Rinse and Repeat

I covered building the driver’s side inner rocker panels, but the passenger side was almost the same, just a bit easier, less rust and rot. Alphie has two very solid inner rockers now, which means I can get to the nose transplant, to wit…

Passenger side inner rocker panel complete -
I'll tidy things up when I apply the new snoz.

Snozectomy

I took the scalpel to the Organ Donor’s nose first because there was more room for error and removing it would inform me about how to remove Alphie’s snoz.

So, what did I learn? First, hacking off Alphie’s nose will be easier than hacking off the Organ Donor’s nose was. I purposefully cut more than I will need from the Donor. The idea is to get it off the car and slowly and carefully whittle my way to the metal that will meet Alphie’s body. That way I get clean metal to weld where the original body panels met, making my welds to mimic factory welds. Having said that, cutting on the Donor was a merry free-for-all. I didn’t have to be that careful to make the cuts clean so I took to the grinders like Michael Meyers with a chainsaw.

The second thing I learned is that I will not replace as much of Alphie as I first thought. I thought I would need to keep the Donor’s inner fender wells and attach the Donor’s nose to Alphie’s front frame rails. As I dug into the Donor, I found that the Donor’s wells were not any better than Alphie’s and that not cutting out the fender well will be a smoking lot easier and less likely to screw up the alignment. That was a big find!

Clearly not a factory weld

Incidentally, I burned through three 7” cutting discs, four 4 1/2” cutting discs and a 4” thin grinding disc; the cordless Sawzall got in on it too. But as you can see, the Organ Donor’s disembodied nose now awaits cleaning and fitting.

I removed the factory – well, it was factory on one side – leaded seams with a propane torch and wire brush. Once I got below the lead on the passenger side, the weld is clearly not a factory weld so the left wing may be a replacement. If it is a replacement, it’s about to go on its third Alpine. I plan to replace the lead to fill the welds as well as other many of the dents. (It's still called "leading" but it doesn't actually use lead, way too toxic.)

That's what a factory weld looks like.

The Donor under the knife, day one.

The Carcass

The Organ Donor is looking more and more like roadkill that the birds have picked over. Now our front yard is adorned with a mangled mass of metal threatening many jagged and angry edges very likely to require a tetanus booster. But progress!