Page Sixteen - Face Lifts and Dental Work

I peeled off Alphie’s old nose and cleaned up the structure underneath.  I grafted in new metal onto her bones, closing in the inner rocker-to-foot well.  Cutting out diseased metal, welding in new tissue, welding, grinding, welding, grinding and more grinding.  Same ol’, same ol…

I discovered that the Donor’s right front wing is a replacement, which I just sawed off to replace the right wing on Alphie – a twofer!  The Donor’s snoz has age spots, a rusted septum, rotten teeth and bad gums.  It also has…

Black Eyes

Alphie’s original eyes got a solid punch - they were severely black and no longer lined up, but the Donor never took a smack to the face, so the one I’m working on is not technically a black eye.  Although Alphie’s original eyes were…  Hell, never mind, I’m straining the medical analogies.

Here's the problem - returning to original dimensions

Let’s look at the Donor’s rusty eye socket.  The area below the driver’s side headlight is rusted
through, leaving me little reference points for where the metal should meet.  Fortunately, with the headlight buckets reinstalled and a tiny smidge of straight metal (see pic), I figured out the amount of space to make the fender line up with the chin valance.

I picked up a cheap contour gauge sometime, somewhere and it’s damn handy.  I used it to map the contour of the fender and transfer it to a piece of sheet metal.  I cut the metal to the curve then cut a 2X16 cm strip of sheet metal, which I TIGed to the curve.  The result is a bracket that will be spot welded to the inside of the fender and will span the gap of rotted out snoz.

Gauging a contour with the contour gauge (Ha! A frowny face;)

The Fix!

Here's how it works

Clearly, there is more metal work to do, but "the fix" allows me to adjust the spacing and gives me some solid metal to attach the chin valance.  The pic shows a rough fitting in dire need of tweaking, but it shows how it works.  Once I weld "the fix" in, I will need to fill in the gap and reweld the seam below the headlight opening.

The opening for the turn signal seems to have been gnawed out.  But I have looked at MANY pics of other Alpine's turn signal openings and most seem chewed out.  Maybe it was an opening cut out on the assembly line rather than die-cut during the stamping of the fender. There is some more work to do here, but I need to replace the turn signal assembly to see where more metal is needed.  You may notice, as I did, that there is only one screw hole securing the turn signal assembly to the fender, clearly a problem.

I'll post more pics as I weld things together.  I've decided to order a new chin valance saving me a lot of banging, grinding, fiddling and such frustrations.  Besides, the metal on the Donor's valance is rusted thin and flimsy.