Crush Box

With these warm temperatures, I figured it was a good time to do some bodywork so I started with the crush box.  For those that don't know, the crush box is at the very front of the car and is really part of the nose.  One of the sides of the crush box had a buckle in it so I used a hammer and dolly to straighten it out. 

I also used the grinder with the wire wheel to strip the paint.

Since this car was a winged car and I'm making it a non-winged car, the next thing that I wanted to tackle was to fill in the wing bar holes.  The aluminum was counter sunk where the wing bar holders were mounted so I again used the hammer and dolly to flatten those out.

The next task was to cut out pieces of aluminium to fill in the holes.  The crush box is made out of 60/1000ths aluminum and I had 50/1000ths so that worked perfectly.  I used another piece of aluminum to put behind the holes and pop riveted the pieces on using countersunk rivets so they would be flush.

I used the same method to fill in some smaller holes and then used some lightweight body filler to fill in the holes and rivets.  I went ahead and filled in all the rivets on the sides since I already had the filler mixed.

I may end up putting a thin layer of "Icing" on the sides before it gets painted but this is good enough for now.