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Showing posts with label Headlight Bucket Alignment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Headlight Bucket Alignment. Show all posts

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Fitting and Aligning Headlight Buckets

Fitting and aligning headlight buckets.  Sounds simple.  Sounds innocent.  Yeah, right...
First you start off with what appears to be a perfectly fine 1963 Corvette front end.


Then you look real hard for any kind of stress fractures that might later show up in the paint job.  You grind back a little paint and you grind back a little fiberglass then you sandwich the area with fresh fiberglass to make it real strong.


Then you keep looking real hard until everything looks suspect then you grind it all back and re-fiberglass everything.


After the fiberglass sets up you clean everything up by grinding and feathering some more.


Headlight bucket inner plate reinforcements are next.  These bolt to the header bar that run left to right just behind the headlights.  After these are bolted in and the support rods are installed its time to apply bonding adhesive.


As we did for the hood, I used a set of dumbbells to match the height of the body and the buckets.  Bonding adhesive was then applied between the body and the header bar and allowed to cure.


I used a bent length of flat bar to get the proper contour as shown.


20 hours later it looks pretty good.  All it needs now is a little primer to pretty it up.


Then you do the exact same thing to the other side.  I am not sure I am done but they're much better.


What the ???  Is that Wilson?


Naw...  It's Ty.  He's working on the interface between the bumper and body.  This too will require grinding, fiberglass and feathering.  More on this in a later edition.

As always, thanks for watching.