Page Eighteen - Gluing!

 

Fitting - it involves all my vice-grips, much pensive staring, and the occasional band-aid.  But at some point, you must start gluing things down and hope that the fitted was sufficient, which it never is…

During the staring part, I noticed that the inner fenders (or wings, whatever - we’re going American in this paragraph) did not meet the lip of the actual fender.  I tried voracious vice-gripping with my biggest pair to force the gap closed, but it didn’t work, and through much failure, I have learned that forcing things means something is wrong.  More staring…

The clue was the difference in the gap between the radiator support and the front frame rails on each side. The passenger was lower than the driver.  As the fiddling continued, I found that by lowering the driver side a bit while raising the passenger side a smidge, closed the gap between the driver side inner fender and the driver side fender and significantly shrunk the gap on the passenger side.  Lo, the pics.

I placed my small square on the gap to show the "fixed" spacing.

Got it - clamp down the driver side of the radiator support and stuff some wooden spacers in the passenger side (again, the pics).  Done!  I fabbed up some nifty sheet-metal angle brackets and went awelding.  The Rootes Group didn’t connect the radiator support to the frame rails, but I couldn’t see another way to fix the gap issues.  I may grind them off once the entire snoz is glued in place, but for now, all is aligned!

Angle bracket in the wrong place

Or so I thought until I slid the valance and chin back in place to check the fit - more exasperated staring...

The passenger side of the valance was lower than the driver side, but why?  Looking straight on, I could see the driver side bolt hole where the bumper mounts but not the hole on the passenger side.  After much discussion with my bewildered dog, I eventually noticed that the bracket that attaches the valance to the radiator support required much violent vice-gripping to meet the radiator support.  Seems I said something about forcing things...

While the vertical spacing of the radiator support was correct, the horizontal spacing was too far back, toward the fire wall, so that when I vigorously vice-gripped the valance bracket to the radiator support, it pulled down the valance.  Egads, Watson…

So… I cut through my nifty angle pieces holding the radiator support, fabbed some new ones, and clamped them in at the same vertical height but moved the support forward so that it met the valance bracket and fixed the valance sag!  I will leave it to your imagination how much time the events of the last three paragraphs took.

Corrected place, welds ground, self-etch primed

Never enough fitting!

Valance bracket glued to the rad support.
Yeah, Rootes put them in crooked - I looked a lots-o-pics. 
Makes the OCD twitch, doesn't it?

Glue on!  With the valance sagless and the inner fender gapless, it was time for gluing.  First, the doohickies, the inner cheeks, er, the cove pieces at the edges of Alphie’s mouth, whatever the hell they’re called – just look at the pic.

Inner cheek, right? What else do you call it?

I pounded out the upper and lower replacement pieces for the driver side and the lower piece for the passenger side, using the rusty old ones as patterns.  When I was prepping the snoz, I welded in the upper and lower on the driver side, but only the upper piece on the passenger side.  I was worried they wouldn’t fit, that I had jumped the gun a bit, so I held off welding the lower piece on the passenger side.

Turns out, it was smart to wait.  (Yes, I did something smart the first time – I pause for adulation.)  With the valance in place, I matched the inner cheeks on both sides and glued them down to valance and to the support braces on the inner fender.  Lo, the pics!

Inner cheek glued down with JB Weld on the seam.
I'll clean it up when I do the finish body work.

From inside the fender well.
Glued but not ground nor primed

Next up – the missing chunk below the driver side turn signal.  Because there was so much rot under the headlight openings, I just cut out the diseased metal; it wouldn’t weld anyway.  But that meant cutting out the lip that attaches snoz to the valance.  I cut out a piece of sheet metal that fit the curve of the fender under the turn signal to re-create the lip.  Then I cut a strip of sheet metal and welded it to the re-created lip.  Easier to show the pics here than to write another 500 words, so take a look…

Lip Replacement (bottom) and other piece,
ready for gluing

Not the prettiest weld ever burnt, but it works

I carefully welded the new metal to the old and only burned through in a couple of places.  Excuse alert: I set the welder to weld clean sheet metal, but when I run across some rust-thinned stuff on Alphie, it often burns through.  I tried lowering the amperage a bit, but then it sputters and doesn’t penetrate well.  So, welding old stuff where rust has eaten some of the thickness unavoidably means burn throughs.  That’s my story, I’m sticking to it, so go on, get out a’here.

Trimmed to fit and vice-gripped

Glued in!  There will be finishing work, as you can see.