King of Sting 1970 Mach 1: Engine Bay Smoothing

Sept, Oct, Nov, 2012

Fabrication of the engine bay close out panels. There has been some work completed elsewhere between the front end weld-in and these engine bay panels, but I thought I would talk about them now since I just posted the new front end. The TCI front end kit came with close out panels to fill the void where the shock towers were cut out. These panels are bolts ins, and wouldn’t look bad at all but I had a better idea.

When I first started the engine bay smoothing I was going to use the provided close out panels from TCI, and just weld in a small flat sheet of metal to repair the rotted out battery tray area. That’s an easy fix there, and they wouldn't have looked too bad.

I have to mention my son Trent because he has procured for me the sheet metal that I have used for these panels and other work I am also doing. I very much appreciate his contribution to this project. He does heat and air work so every once in a while he’ll yank a rooftop unit off of a building and he saves me one of the large panels from it. This is perfect sheet metal to do this type of fab work and just about any other sheet metal repairs needed on the car. So, just include that in the several other mods that’s happening to this car, it’s gonna be part AC unit as well.

I started with a large piece of cardboard to size the pieces in, marking, cutting, test fitting until I was happy with the fit on the cardboard. I then transferred this pattern over to the sheet metal Trent had gotten me. A few minutes later using a cutting wheel and I have a roughed out section to start test fitting for the engine bay. This took several test fits before I was quite happy with the final results. I first started with full sides, all the way from the radiator support to the firewall and had both sides fitting very nice and snug, following all the contours. I left the tops long by about 4” or so because I wasn’t quite sure what I was gonna do for the top edge, roll it over, cut it, or something else. The issue with having the panels run all the way to the firewall was the hood hinge mount areas. These areas are recessed and mounting the hinges to the panels in an angled position would cause problems with the hood mounting. To remedy this, I just cut the panels back to the edges of the recessed area for the hood hinges and blended the welds into the radius in each area. This is not quite as nice as having smooth sides all the way but still a very much better look than factory in my opinion.

For the top treatment I decided to cut and lay that piece down flat on top of the inner fender and weld it to the top of the side panel. This will tuck up under the fenders when they are installed. The reasoning on this instead of having the panels bent over the top is because there is a front to back radius built into the inner fender top edges. This area is not flat, it does have a slight bend to it moving from the firewall to the radiator support. So, I cut the two edges straight for a good fit where they come together in a 90, and welded the two edges which made a very nice corner once grinding of the welds was completed.

These side panels run all the way down to the frame rails and I ran welds along the bottom of the panels into the frame rails which made for nice looking radius when the grinder was applied there. The welds where the panels run into the hood hinge recession areas worked out well also, these welded up very easily and blended in smooth for the desired effect of one piece. To stabilize the panels they were spot welded from the outside every few inches along the edge of the shock tower cutouts. This stiffened things up very nicely. These panels are quite solid in their new home and look really good with the welds smoothed out.

Original front end before any work being done to it.

After cutting out all the old, and welding in some new front end components.

Notice the battery tray panel in the upper right of picture, all but gone.

This is what I was going to do for smoothing, using the TCI shock tower close out panels and a piece of sheet metal to patch the area of rusted out junk where the battery was. Then, I changed my mind.

Mocked up with the TCI close out panels.

Here is what I came up with for full close out panels all the way to the firewall. Passenger side.

Driver side full close out panel. Notice how I left the tops extended until I decided what to do up there.

Common vantage point view.

This is how I remedied the hood hinge situation. Cutting the panel back to weld and blend in around the recessed area for the hood hinge. Passenger.

Same thing over here on the driver side. Notice the recessed area is larger on the driver side. This is to accommodate the master cylinder and the metering block for the brakes among other things.

Common vantage point.

After welding in and also cutting the tops off and welding them in place. You can see the burn through areas where I spotted the panels in from behind on the shock tower cutout locations. Also the welds along the bottom where panels are attached to the frame rails.