HOW TO: Repair wings

Now on the home straight, we sort the fiddly bits and splice our Mk1 Cortina Estate’s repaired front wing back together.

Part four of our step-by-step guide to saving you money.

We’re on the tail end of restoring our Mk1 Cortina wing on Rob Pattenden’s Woody estate. We undertook some repairs last month but just as importantly, we looked at the options for combating the ever-present battle against rust and holding it back so there’s less chance of it coming back to bite in the future. But we’ve still got a way to go because with any restoration project, there’s a whole load of niggling bits that also need sorting. We’ve already attended to the really

common stuff to virtually any classic Ford wing — the bottom edge at the back, the headlight surrounds and right now, we’ve got to make and fit some tricky curved sections, too.

But they needn’t be tricky if you’ve got the right gear — one thing you do need is to buy stuff that will help you. Yes, you can make do but buying proper, sometimes specialist, tools often makes you wonder how you ever survived, as you find yourself using them more and more. Like good hammers and dollies, some tools simply become extensions of your working hand. The case in point is a set of shrinking/stretching vices — and on this score, it pays to buy the best you can otherwise, like us, you’ll spend valuable workshop time getting them to work properly! It’s all valuable experience, though.

We’ll show how we made some infill pieces, fit those panels we bought from Ex-Pressed Steel Panels to tuck between the back of the wing and the A-post, and show the basics of fitting our wing to the car. Here goes — the end is in sight!

Shrinking and Stretching

We’ve replaced the back edge of our wing because there were some dodgy repairs that had been caked in lead, while the wing return was extremely weak — it wouldn’t have folded over without breaking when we fitted our new wing infill panels we bought from Ex-Pressed Steel Panels. Above it though….

… lurked this lovely hole that had also been filled with lead. We needed to make a new piece to let in.

We began by folding up a piece of 18-gauge sheet steel using some very handy — and pretty cheap bits of kit.

These are a pair of vice-mounted V-brakes, which are invaluable for making small panels like this one.They simply mount in the vice using a pair of in-built, rare earth magnets — meaning, they’re very, very strong.

You simply draw a straight guide line, align that up with the pointed side and wind the vice up allowing the V-blade to fold into the matching female side, ending up with a right angled piece of bent steel — although you can keep going and it’ll go past 90 degrees.

Next we need a guide to bend the shape to, so we used a section of card and drew around that with a felt-tip pen.

What we need now are a pair of shrinking and stretching machines, although you can buy a combined machine, where you swap heads when you want to perform either operation. These are a bit of a pain though so if you can afford a pair, buy them — you won’t regret it!

The shrinking machine gathers the metal together to form inside curves.

The stretcher, does the opposite, forcing the metal apart to form an outside curve - so you can actually form an S-bend on one piece of metal!

We used the stretcher to form an outside curve in our section of metal we formed in the V-brake.

It takes a bit of tweaking and patience but you can make accurate small sections — and big ones with care — that will form a section ready to be welded in. We cut round it with a 1 mm cutting disc and welded it in place ....

...Then cleaned it up. With a bit of care, it should disappear completely!

Note we have left the return edge at right angles ready to be folded over for when we fit the wing infill pieces — shown in step 31.

Sidelight section

Our wing came with the adjacent panel section still attached.This is the bit that mounts the sidelight — although, it’s the later Aeroflow type that we’ll swap in a second.You can see too that the front section of the bottom of the actual wing is missing its edge, which we’ll also make using the shrinking machine.

We decided that the top section that also still has a piece of the slam panel attached will be really useful, since the seam joining into the wing is very good — this is always hard to get right and since it already is it seems daft not to use it.

We also have a new panel to fit — from the Mk1 Cortina Owners’ Club — although we’ll only use the bottom half, which will also convert the sidelight panel to the correct one.

As a guide, we clamped a new headlight mounting panel into place, which should give us a nice round section to work to.These panels are readily available from many sources but we also discovered that all are not the same — some are fabricated and not pressings, so it pays to check dimensions as some of the stock we had were seriously over-size and didn’t fit, causing us plenty of headaches.These ones are pressed and do!

We only used the bottom half of the panel, although we cut it oversize as we’ll cut through two pieces at once. We also clamped the section to the headlight bucket as a guide.

Next we concentrated on getting this seam nice and neat — we actually used the shrinker to tweak it slightly so that the curves matched each other and clamped the two together.

Turn it over and you can see we used welding clamps to clamp it, but we’ve also used our air-powered hole punch to form some holes in one flange so that we can plug-weld the two panels together from the inside.

Our panel overlaps at the top, allowing us to slice through both with a 1 mm cutting disc to get an accurate join to weld to — edge-to-edge.

Once welded, we cleaned the welds up, blended them in and sanded the panels smooth.

Next section on the list was to re-make the missing edge of the bottom of the wing. We also have to fit a lower valence to the front panel at some point, so we clamped this in position and used the shape as a guide to make the panel to.

Once more, we made a 90-degree bent panel in 18-gauge steel using the vice V-brake and shrank it to form a curve, using the valence panel as a guide.

Made oversize and clamped in place, it only needs trimming to fit, cutting through as it overlaps and then welding in place edge to edge.

Cleaned up, it nicely blends in and we have a very neat seam, too.

Wing infill panels

These were our original infill panels.There’s two here — the piece that joins to the wing and is folded over like a doorskin, and the piece that attaches to the A-pillar — although, as you can see, it currently isn’t! Both were badly corroded and would have needed lots of repair to get them right.

So we replaced them with excellent reproductions from Ex-Pressed Steel Panels, which fit really well.

This bit’s the wing return, which is attached by folding the edge over. We’ve already painted the inside of the wing plus the infill panel’s inside faces with POR15, which we detailed last month.

We clamped the infill piece in place using panel clamps, using the same methods detailed in the doorskin feature on page 96.You need to line up the curves of the infill section, so they meet with those of the wing.

Then we dressed the return edges over in exactly the same way, lifting the dolly slightly at the back edge so we were hammering into the front edge.

We temporarily fixed the A-pillar infill panel with sheet metal screws for now. We’ve already punched some plug-weld holes in the mounting flange with the air-punch, but this section needs to be accurate as it will hold the wing off. It will need some tweaking to get right.

To do this, we used a pair of pliers to bend the mounting tabs slightly to push the panel into place.

The two panels should meet together like this — pretty much perfectly, which is actually quite tricky to do and needs to be done on the car.

Basic wing fitting

The first job is to refit the door and the bonnet — although we’d already sorted that prior to taking the old wing off. Both these need to be in place so we have some reference to work to.

Before we took the old wing off, we marked some reference lines with a Sharpie so we knew where the new wing should end up.

We’re aiming to get a nice even gap around the scuttle panel — the end of which I’ve also previously replaced!

We start by lining up the back edge and use sheet metal screws to hold it in place, through a punched hole we put there using the air punch.

You will find that the top of the wing around the scuttle will drop — you can push it up from the bottom and clamp it in place…

…While using the door and its moulded sections as a guide.There is a lot of pushing, shoving, moving back, forwards, up, down — hence the necessity for sheet metal screws so you can move them as you need to.You won’t get it right first time and it is daunting, but take your time and be prepared to spend plenty of time tweaking to get it right…

...Until you end up with a gap like this!

Slam Panel

The slam panel is a bit unconventional. We spliced that together.

First off, for reference, we used the bonnet adjusting screw and its mounting nut — we took the screw out…

…And used it to bolt the two panels together, giving us a positive reference.

Then with a 1 mm cutting discs, we cut through both panels…

…With the aid of two Clecos and a strip of joining sheet metal, we have an accurate splice.

And we’re done!