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Page 21 |
Front Grill Modification |
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My front grill was looking really horrible and rusty so I thought that the easiest and quickest way to clean it up was to send it to the sand blasting shop. This turned out to be a mistake, when I got it back it was totally cleaned of all rust and paint, but Flat! You may have to look at the bigger picture to see what I mean. so that basically killed that. so I went to my friendly man to see if I could get another. no way! the thing is that my camper is an early model with the indicators at the bottom so the grill is rounded and was only available for the first 4 or 5 years of bay window production, so finding a good one cheap just doesn't happen. |
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So the option I choose was
to get a later grill which is the orange one in the top picture and remake
the ends. this turned out to be very easy and didn't take much time. the
grill I got was quite new and was easily cleaned up using paint stripper (I
decided not to send this one to the blaster!) It is slightly different from the original grill, not only is it square at the ends and longer, but also the mounting holes are formed in the front, and the last slot (with the mounting hole in it) is also the same length as the other slots whereas the original grill the last slot is not as tall. |
| So to change this new panel
to the old style firstly I marked out the radius on both ends, you can see
this in the above picture, there is plenty of metal to play with. once I was happy with the shape I then cut the ends down to size with an angle grinder. Because the edges of the original are nicely rounded I decided to weld an edge to the cut ends then I could file I nice radius onto the edge. |
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| And here is the finished article
in place. This only took a couple of hours, finding an old grill in good condition would have taken a lot longer and cost a lot more money. The only thing that I need to do now is find an plastic grill that goes behind the metal grill as I didn't keep the new one and the old style doesn't fit! |
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Please feel free to e-mail me with suggestions or questions and I will try and oblige. |
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