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Body Repair
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Professional Body Repair
- Once the chrome trim and bumpers were removed, some fairly significant body damage from an earlier collision was revealed at the nose of the Alfa. It was determined that some professional front-end bodywork was in order prior to repainting the vehicle.
- The first step in the repair is to pull the damaged area of the nose back to its original shape as closely as possible. Professional body tools are used to carefully pull the dented area out, returning the nose to something close to its original shape.
- A slide-hammer with a claw attachment is used to further work the damaged area back out and into its original shape. As the slide-hammer is used progressively around the edge of the damaged area, some old body filler from an earlier repair breaks loose.
- A grinding wheel is used to remove some additional filler and reveal the extent of the original damage.
- After grinding, and some additional tapping with a hammer from underneath the damaged area, metal studs are spot-welded onto strategically placed points on the damaged metal. The studs will help in pulling the damaged area of the nose back to square using the slide hammer. Once that process is complete, the metal studs are ground off, and the metal surface is ground smooth again.
- The next step is to apply some spray-on adhesive to prepare the area for application of some body filler.
- Once the adhesive has been applied, a small amount of body filler is applied to the metal to finish out the shaping process. With the metal-shaping that was done prior to this point, only a small amount of body filler will be necessary.
- Once the filler has dried, it is shaped with hand-tools and then fine-sanded to bring it to its final shape.
- Once sanded down to approximate the original shape of the nosepiece, the repaired area is primed to prepare it for painting, and given a final sanding.
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