Grille repair

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Saetun

Saetun

Sinister Swinger
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A couple of weeks ago i picked up a new to me grille for my '73 Swinger. Other than needing new turn signal lenses & a cleaning & repaint, the only major flaw was the broken upper mounting tabs.

I cleaned the new grille & re-shot it with Mopar Argent almost immediately after getting it home. Yesterday, I went to the body shop where the car is & picked up my original grille, which was way passed the point of repair & today the surgery began.

Here is a shot of one of the broken tabs from my new grille.
 

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Using the original grille as a donor, I removed a large enough piece of material to rough out a couple of replacement tabs for my new grille. I took some measurements and using the broken tabs did a rough layout on the pieces to be grafted in.
 

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Using a sharpie, I traced the breaks on the old broken tabs & using a Dremel & cutoff wheel got to the rough shape of my repair patches. After a few test fits & adjustment with a couple of small hand files, I had two pieces that fit rather well. I kept adjusting taking very little off at a time until i was happy with the patch.
 

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Once I was happy with fitment & convinced myself to stop messing with it before i went too far, I mixed up the Devcon Plastic Weld.
 

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I used enough Plastic Weld to fill in the material and then some. After a short setting time I was happy to see a decent initial repair of both tabs. After the epoxy sets for another 24 hours, I'll remove the excess & shoot the tabs with a little Argent to seal the deal. I'll put up the finished tabs & overall grille shots either tomorrow or the next day after sanding & paint.
 

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Looking good. Interesting how that stuff goes from dark to white. Because of the way those tabs break, I wonder if it would be worth making a thin guage metal reinforcing plate and bond it with the same adhesive. It could be L shaped to bond to the main grille.
 
Idaho said:
Because of the way those tabs break, I wonder if it would be worth making a thin guage metal reinforcing plate and bond it with the same adhesive. It could be L shaped to bond to the main grille.
Click to expand...


Exactly what I was thinking as well.
 
that will come out like new ,just make sure you install it once,the more you mess with it the easier it will break......:read2::read2::read2::thumblef:
 
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