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Old 02-15-2023, 01:57 PM
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heinke heinke is offline
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Default Accident damaged wheel house

This is the second item of accident repair I'm doing in addition to the headlight fairing ring. This involves "metal un-shaping" and some welding for tears in the aluminum. This wheel house took the brunt of the force from the Suburban front wheel. The .040 3003 was no match and crumpled like a beer can.

Here's the piece before repairs started. I thought repairing this piece (instead of fabricating new) would be a good challenge and learning experience. The rear edge was wrapped around the footbox chassis tube from the collision force in effect adding significant stretch.



Interesting part of this tear is that it's parallel to a weld seam. The original weld was O/A so that tells me the weld was at least as strong as the metal around it if not stronger.





Other damage.





I'll post the repair process in subsequent posts.
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Old 02-15-2023, 06:44 PM
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The wheel house had a 1" wide strip of aluminum welded onto the outer edge to provide rigidity. This strip was drastically stretched during the collision. I had no way to effectively shrink the strip so it would need to be cut off and replaced.

I used the English wheel with a go-kart slick on the upper to straighten out the crumpled metal. Starting with a fairly wide gap between the tire and a
fairly curved anvil, I could roll the crumpled metal between them without introducing new damage. By gradually closing the gap, the crumples and dents could be rolled out. Once the metal was laying back into arrangement, the tears started to close back up. I then welded up the tears and this was the result.



Now that the piece was back in arrangement and tears rejoined, it was obvious the outer rear section was stretched out where it had been wrapped around the foot box chassis tube. I started shrinking using a TM Tech power hammer on the outer edge. This left a bunch of stretched metal trapped in a 6" round domed area inboard from the edge. The wheel house is too big and floppy for me to effectively guide it on the power hammer for shrinking in this middle area. So I used a rubber mallet and nylon doughnut dolly to shrink the trapped metal there. It took two courses of shrinking followed by smoothing on the English wheel to remove the excess stretch.



The next step will be to "fine tune" the edge to the shape of the fender wheel opening. I anticipate more shrinking on the edge and then locking in the shape by welding a curved strip back onto the edge.

More to come when the snow we received last night melts as the next steps require trial fitting on the car.
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Old 02-15-2023, 06:45 PM
crystallographic crystallographic is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by heinke View Post
This is the second item of accident repair I'm doing in addition to the headlight fairing ring. This involves "metal un-shaping" and some welding for tears in the aluminum. This wheel house took the brunt of the force from the Suburban front wheel. The .040 3003 was no match and crumpled like a beer can.

Here's the piece before repairs started. I thought repairing this piece (instead of fabricating new) would be a good challenge and learning experience. The rear edge was wrapped around the footbox chassis tube from the collision force in effect adding significant stretch.



Interesting part of this tear is that it's parallel to a weld seam. The original weld was O/A so that tells me the weld was at least as strong as the metal around it if not stronger.





Other damage.





I'll post the repair process in subsequent posts.

I have taken photos of metal crash-failures over time.
Car wrecks, tornadoes taking airplanes apart ....
O/A welds have not very often failed, to my knowledge.
I suppose they do, if not done correctly.
4130, mild steel, various aluminum alloys .....
One front-engine dragster had a blower sneeze which dismantled the engine during the run. Car rolled on and was towed to pits. Body pulled off. Cage at rear contained tank, that was then very "quilted" and puffed out through tube-cage.
Gas welded.
No leaks.
Vote was to finish the season the way it was, so they did.
(note: no fuel pumps on these cars - blower pressure pumps fuel. Sneeze far overpressures the tanks. Major HP now being produced in the v-8 engines, so blower pressures are high, with sneezes being explosive in extremes. )
-end-
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