Oh how I love doing automotive body work. Not. Give me a wrench any day. But ya gots to do what ya gots to do if you're too cheap to pay someone to do it, and the TO-35 hood's side panels need some attention. And it's about time. This poor tractor has been relegated to the "back 40", i.e., behind the garage, for way too long. And I just looked when I posted anything about it - a year ago. Ok, I didn't need to know that. But it's actually not as bad as it sounds. It was a whole two months ago that I did start working on the hood. I got it pulled off and disassembled. Then other things came up. Like more tractors, but I digress. So, here's the problem to tackle. Someone in the distant past used a hot wrench (oxy-acetylene torch) to hack off the bottom inch or so of the hood's side panels, I presume to mount a front end loader, and I am going to attempt to rectify that blunder.
The grill's chin sheet metal was missing (the part in the photo below with the crank hole in it), so I splurged and bought a new reproduction piece online. As you can tell by the below photo, the grill needs to be bent to match the contour of the chin piece.
And now we skip forward two months and are back to today. Below is a better shot of one of the cut ends.
I ground the mess flat so it would be easier to weld a new piece on. And yes, that is brazing filler rod in there. I had to grind it out so the welds wouldn't get contaminated.
I have a small piece of 1966 Barracuda rear fender left over from that body work job, so I cut a chunk out to use on the 35.
I'm just winging it here, and as such, I don't really know the best way to form the bottom point of the side panel. I figured it wouldn't work to just use a ball pein hammer to beat the flat sheet metal into a bulbous panel end, so this is what I did, weld the fender chunk onto the side panel. Hmm, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but now what.
Once I saw how bad that turned out, I took some tin snips and sliced the bottom of the new piece so I could bend the slices in a better contour. I then lathered on copious amounts of weld bead.
Um, that's better, but not by much.
Then, after doing some further fitment checks with the newly-formed side panel and chin piece, I realized the chin piece too far off the side panel contour. I'm guessing the chin piece came from India or Pakistan. It is a well-made heavy piece but I think the shape is wrong. In any event, I need to make the side panel match the chin piece. For starters, I cut a shape from cardboard and used it to mark out the shape on the side panel.
In the photo below, if you look at the left end of the side panel, the panel contour is waaaaay off from the cardboard. I needed to fix that, so I took my angle grinder with a thin cutoff wheel and made some slices into the thing I had just finished welding up.
After an hour of yet more welding / grinding / welding / grinding, below is the finished product. It's not great, but then I have to tell myself, it's a tractor. Nobody will notice once it's all painted nice. The good news is, one side is done. The bad news is, one side still needs to be done. Hopefully it will take less than the 4 hours it took to do this one. I think I'll end here. Stay tuned.
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