Starting to look like a car again

Over the last week I have worked on getting the front end fitted, back when I decided to go fiberglass I had two thoughts about it one it can’t rust and two I don’t have to weld anything… Now that I have a decent grasp on welding I kind of wish I just went with metal… more on that in a bit.

So where do I start, I kind of jumped all over the place doing this, lets start with how everything fits out of the box (ok it was a crate, same thing). I also fitted my boot lid which fits really well considering the LH side of the boot is messed up from an old accident.

So the front required a bit of trimming this is fine I knew this was need. Arc Angels actual makes it bigger so you can trim to get a better fit. But before that I needed to do some surgery on the flitch panels. I needed to create a mounting point as well as allow the fiberglass A-panel to fit in correctly. Fun fact though when you cut the flitch lip off the door hinge loses a lot of its strength. So I had to add the lip back, err well part of it. Heres a montage of all that stuff, at least what I captured. Also the RH door started fitting really good as well, this was a nice bonus.

Now that that was all fabbed up it was time to start trimming… this part honestly sucked. There was a whole lot of on and off small trim here and there lots of pushing and prying. I looked like Tony Montana by the time I was done…. oh and that was just one night, and it still wasn’t really on yet. So heres some in progress photos.

The next day I did more trimming, and hammering, yea my nice mounting plates apparently were in the way, I found this odd because the curve was nicely matched to the door… owell its a mini… why would anything line up? But now I finally had some bolts in the A-panels and I gotta say button head allen bolts were the way to go, I kinda like the look.

The scuttle corners still needed some trimming and I surprisingly didn’t take any pics of the after trim, it looks a little better, I’m not super happy with the overall fitment but I read somewhere I can heat this up a little and bend it into shape so I might give that a go. Or just let the GA heat do it for me. I got the front mounts attached, I used button press body mounts I feel they look pretty good, the downside I had to bend the front to fit them because its almost like the front end is turned inward for some reason, lucky me it flexed pretty easily, lets just hope it holds. I also decided to fit the front grill, another spot that didn’t seem to fit properly, I was still able to get 4 cleco’s in to hold it in place and it looked pretty good. Not sure why the lower part of the grill is an inch off the lower but it still looks correct so I will live with it I guess. I also threw on a wheel just to see how it looked.

Now we are going to jump to something different… kind of a side bar… I previously debated leaving off the outer sills because the shell will be media blasted and I figured it might be good to leave them off. I changed my mind on that so I finally closed up the sills. I also closed up the jacking points as I won’t be using them and well the supporting mounts are not in the sill anyways. In hindsight I wish I also closed up the holes for the slinging brackets (also not in there). Guess they will just breath a bit more this way.

Now some bad stuff that happened previously during the front fitment that I failed to mention. So I broke my hinge mount on my bonnet… yea that sucked, guess I should have stored it better while working on things. Plus side it should be easy to repair with some bondo glass. Also because I didn’t fit the top of the inner wing where the front end bolts too, when I drilled the RH side I hit one of the many holes on it and it pulled through the fiberglass, FML. So I need to fix that as well. Heres some pics of that nonsense.