Lenoir – 65 project Bus Front end assessment

So transaction made we take Lenoir to our welding guru and here we blog about what he found up the front of the Bus as this appeared to be the worst area. Not for the feint hearted this project..

This what we started with, on the surface we have a small plate pop riveted to whats underneath and then prayed in grey primer in an attempt to make this area look ok – well at 50ft maybe. Who are we kidding?

This is the view from the inside – clearly this van has been hot fairly hard in this area some time ago, not sure how much can be rescued here, but Gerson makes an a-pillar repair in his funky green panels.

So fairly quickly the patch is removed and some exploration is made to the surrounding area, all fairly scary stuff, we have drill holes indicating a nail puller, missing metal altogether and skims of bondo around the light aperture, we think the bucket is jeopardy;

Ok enough with the messing, lets get on with it, clearly the lower nose will need replacing. Gerson sells panels that go up to underneath he headlight buckets and this is what the marker line is – the ‘tall’ repair panel. Lets see whats under there;

And this is the picture from the other side;

Moving inside the Bus that suspicious plate was removed from the floor and we start to look at the lower a-pillar. First thing to do is remove the door with that amazing hinge pin pushing tool – makes this job easier. Not much floor left;

With the door removed, the patches removed and after some exploration we have a sorry looking part to our project. At this point we will need inner and outer nose, tall lower nose repair, a-pillar, front floor and doglegs. This is not going be cheap to repair this;