Page Fifteen - Winging It!

A thoroughly mangled wing!

A quick update - Alphie enters a new phase of restoration, stuff that will actually show!  My biggest challenge from day one has been replacing Alphie's crumpled nose.  I'm finally there!

Cancer Treatment - Round Umpteen

Alphie is right side up, her rotisserie has been tweaked, and she’s ready for her next round of cancer treatment.

First Protocol: Remove a Wing, the passenger side first.  With solid rockers, I’m prepping Alphie for her snoz transplant, and like everything else, when I sawed off the passenger front wing (fender for the yanks), I found rust growing with kudzu-like abandon.  So de-rusting is the goal.

Wingless with all the rust showing

The lower back corners of the wheel wells, where floors meet firewall meet wings and wheel wells is particularly fertile soil for rust.  Wingless and in the full light of day, the rust defiantly sneers.  I take the spike of my body hammer and tap around to find the deepest pockets of rust, creating cascades of flaky rust and find several spots of serious infection.  In several places, the metal breaks away leaving holes where I must fit and weld new sheet metal.  Marshal the grinders!

Second Protocol: Cut, Cut, Cut.  Fit the small grinder with the cutting disc and get at it.  I cut until I find healthy metal and a suitable place where I can most easily fit and weld in patches.  Except for the lower corners of the wheel wells, most of the new metal will be covered by the wing and wheel well, so it needs to be strong and rust protected, but not necessarily pretty.

Another view after one patch

Pencil, marker, file folders, scissors, belt sander, band saw – template making.  With each new template, I’m slowly getting better at fitting patches.  Sometimes the learning curve is a long arc.  Sunbeam’s version of 16-gauge sheet metal is thinner than Lowes’ version – I think I’ve said that before, but it never led to any corrective actions, until now.  

I finally started adjusting the amperage on the MIG welder; you would think that I would have learned this earlier…  I had set the MIG to weld Lowe’s metal, and it welded it with ease and efficiency.  But when joining Lowes metal to Sunbeam metal, I was joyfully burning holes in Alphie’s tissue.  Lowering the amperage mitigates burn throughs but doesn’t completely eliminate them.  Must improve welding skills!

Third Protocol: Weld, Grind, Weld, Grind.  With patches fitted, I blaze away with the MIG.  Since the patches are thicker than Alphie tissue as I have mentioned, I can’t run a continuous weld line.  I have to connect tack weld so that I don’t put too much heat into the thinner metal.  The problem is that the finished weld looks like a row of warts that require copious grinding.  Even when the patches are welded and ground, it looks like surgery done after Dr. Frankenstein spent a few nights closing down the bars.

After etch priming, I will mix up some JB Weld and use it like plastic filler to smooth out the welds that will show inside the wheel wells.  JB Weld is harder to file and sand to finish, but it is so much stronger than plastic fillers.  Eventually, the wheel wells will be factory fresh and a little stronger than the original.

Patches welded in with more to come

Painted with POR-15 and the wing trimmed to the fire wall and inner wing

Detail showing the attaching surfaces for the Organ Donor's wing

Update: After cleaning up the driver wheel well - ready to fit new metal

Update: Snoz ectomy complete!  Some clean up done, more to come