Had a slight distraction yesterday, a couple hood sides for a 37 Ford showed up. The owner wanted to remove the side "grille", and add a tapered recess pan with clamshell louvers. Here's what we started with...
Some cutoff wheel action later....
In an attempt to keep as much metal on the ends as possible, we opted to flatten the sad remains of the horizontal fins. This involved some shrinking via the heating tip in the dent puller..
Looks like someone has spilled bondo all over this panel. Funny the inside didn't look all that mangled to warrant the amount we found.. Must be a TV car..
The shrinking efforts flattened out the ends fairly well...
I filled in the previous trim holes with 18 Ga plugs and TIG fusion while the owner worked away at removing the bondo so we could see what we had to work with...
Next, we had to fold a flange in the front and extend the factory bead around the opening down the front where we had flattened the panel. Some of the existing bead profiles had seen better days in the past 80 plus years, so I checked a set of joggle dies I had made for drip rail as it looked close...
New flange folded at the front, bead added using the Lennox, original beads touched up …
Tapered pan fabricated.....
Louver layout
Welded in place..
He is having some art deco style trim pieces made to accent the louvers down the center, topped by 62 Impala fender trim. We didn't have those, so here it is with alternate SS fuel line for your viewing pleasure...
![]()