the "After" picts of my front clip swap

[Pablo]

here are the "after" picts of my front clip swap. I used the fiberglass headerpanel sold by G body parts.com and the fillers, new bezels, fiberglass kirban bumper, and new fasteners

Because I have a powerstroke IC i had to use some ol' fashioned ingenuity to mount the grille. They include hardware and instructions for mounting the grille from the back "wall" of the headerpanel. Since this had to be cut out to accomodate the IC I went to plan B which was to use the space covered by the bezels on the inside end and fab up a bracket on each end that I then made into an L shape. I then drilled a hole on each end of the grille edge to accomodate a bolt which I had to make a small amount of forward clearance for on the header panel. It came out alot better than I thought it would its basically invisible. I took a close up pic so you can see where the bolt is on the edge of the grille. Im just getting the car ready for painting in the near future.

I included one of my ugly mug after all day of working on the car on about 4 hours of sleep and a hang over

 

[Pablo]

A few disclaimers:

I meant to paint the turn signal bezels black but ran out of paint

those wheels suck, I have weld draglites 15x3 and 28x10.5 slicks in the back but I have a bad bushing which destroyed one of my skinnies tires and I can't go driving around on slicks. I plan on either going with my GTA wheels or getting some streetable rear tires for the welds

another thing, yes the grey fender is nasty, my buddy wanted to give me a quick tutorial on painting so he sprayed it with a color he had in his garage and it actually came out real nice considering it had about 10 minutes of prep. It was just to show me the dos and donts and whether or not I liked that color. I hit it with a sanding block a few days ago for some reason. I think its because I wanted to make it look extra hideous.. so that is the reason for the scuff marks.

 

[Aztlanahauc]

looks good..

 

[bruce]

here are the "after" picts of my front clip swap. I used the fiberglass headerpanel sold by G body parts.com and the fillers, new bezels, fiberglass kirban bumper, and new fasteners

It looks like it all lined up really well.
Is it as good as it looks in the pics?.
Nice seeing how all the different bits line up.

 

[Pablo]

It looks like it all lined up really well.
Is it as good as it looks in the pics?.
Nice seeing how all the different bits line up.

It came out pretty good, its definately not perfect though and it took ALOT of work to get it to where it is now. The top edge that meets the hood seems to have a different angle (the angle of the "v" as you are looking down is off on the header panel). I had to sand the daylights out of it to get it to where the gap had an acceptably uniform width (its still not perfect) all the way across.

There is also a slight misalignment with the passenger side bumper filler edge and the grille border on the header panel. Maybe a 16th of an inch which is frustrating but in looking on pictures online of other turbo buicks im noticing there arent very many that have perfect alignment between the filler and header panel edges. On the RH side bumper filler, it seems to sag downward. I had to sort of fab a spacer to go between the tip of the filler and the inside of the bumper to hold it up to be even with the other side.

Another flaw is that the header panel seems to be ever so slightly narrower than the distance between the outside edges of my fenders.. maybe a 16th of an inch on each side.

I really wanted perfection so i spent a good while massaging the parts, tweaking the mounting points, etc. I still have a few issues but they are mostly visible to me and not the cursory observer. the Gbody parts.com headerpanel is a decent piece i guess but it does require alot of work for a car like mine. No holes are predrilled.

For anyone that may be reading this in the future, here is a tip. Dont bother trying to re-install the little plastic screw inserts in the new header panel. You will waste time cutting holes with a dremel only to have poor alignment. If you just drill small holes directly into the header panel the screws will self tap and hold everything together perfectly.