Note the position of the hood with respect to the inner fender and front
splash pan.
The driver side has a very different position. The entire front end
is pushed to the right, as you face the car. Not knowing British cars,
Dad didn't notice this problem. Since we had owned both an MGB and an
Austin Healey Sprite before, we knew what to look for.
This picture shows the misalignment at the hood latch.
The driver inner fender also indicates the problem to be primarily the
top of the inner fenders. The car had been smacked on the passenger
side sometime during it's lifetime.
So how did we fix this? Kurt fashioned a bracing of 2x4 wood, using
clamps to hold them in place. We knew it wouldn't take much force to
realign the front, since the bottom was in alignment and only the top
was out.
The angle finder in the front will help us guage when things are back
in alignment.
A chain puller is used to apply the force to pull the front of the driver
side towards the left.
All set up and ready to pull. The angle finder shows the degrees that
the alignment is off, just a mere 4 degrees.
After the pull. We stopped at about a half degree off so that we didn't
overstress anything.
Now note the alignment of the inner fender to the hood.
The drivers side alignment is much improved.
Once we remounted the fenders, another problem became very obvious.
Note the small distance that the fender sticks out in front of the hood.
The driver fender sticks out just a bit more. We think that different
years had slightly different length fenders. It's not much and the grill
hides this defect, so we decided to leave this for now and maybe we
will fix it later.
Kurt reinstalling the grill. It fits much better now.
Now that this is done, we can reinstall the engine from the second
pull and start enjoying driving the car. Little did we know that this
was not all the surprises that Sadie had for us.
