Scratch built grill shell

so i felt the need to do a metal working project, and i have seen people make custom grill shells, but i have never seen a home made 28-29 model A shell. so thats what i did, a custom model A grill shell, i made it a little thinner than factory and left the center in ( i am going to dimple die some 2 in. holes at a later date). as for now it is going to hang on the wall for decoration, maybe put it on a car some day. took about 4 hours.

to start i took an original model A grill shell and made a poster board template of the inner and outer shape of the face (dont have a pic lol). then i traced it out on some 18 gauge steel sheet and cut it out. got out the bead roller and used my step dies and used it to recess the center of the grill shell ( you can see this in all pics, sorry got carried away and forgot to take pics at first).

cut a strip of 18 gauge steel to wrap around the edge. i used a mig to tack it all up, then cleaned it with a wire brush, and used the tig to weld it up. took my time, welding no more than 1/2in at a time to minimize warping.



once it was all welded up, i used a 36 soft grinding, pad to knock the welds down, then weld to 80 grit, to 180 grit on the grinder, then hit it with a DA with 180. then put it back in the bead roller to put the step down around the back edge to sit behind the hood and hood sides




then did some hammer and dollie work around the bottom to give it a rolled edge similar to the original.


all done

nice job....

Very nice Mike.

Thats pretty cool

finally got around to finishing this thing, now it just hangs on the wall

Not sure how many man hours you have in that but it looks like you should be able to sell those pretty easy. $$$
It turn our really slick Mike. Nice work!