One of the things we put on our list of projects for this build was a tilt front end. This is another one of those things that we've talked about doing for a long time. We just needed an appropriate build to try it out on. So here it is.
We cut all of the additional weight from the radiator support and the underside of the hood once we attached the hood to the fenders. To keep the body lines looking good we measured the thickness of the rubber stops that we're originally between the hood/fenders and made spacer blocks to bolt thru.
The frame horns were left just long enough to accommodate the bosses for the pivot point. Damn....we cut up tons of cardboard making templates for the pivot brackets. I think we had 4 or 5 versions before settling on the one in the pics. We welded them directly to the bottom of the radiator support.
Once we had front clip tilting, we identified our next issue. The grill was NOT up to the stress of being yanked on when opening the hood. So we tucked a piece of 3/4 pipe behind the grill and made a couple of little brackets to attach the pipe to the radiator support. Now you wrap your fingers around the pipe to tilt the hood.
The radiator is a NOS unit that was still in its '70 something box. One of dad's estate sale treasures. We fabbed up a few brackets and ran some stiffeners down to the shock brackets. Then we attached our stop cables to the top of the radiator support brackets.
The old hood hinge brackets became the hood pin brackets. They also help support the hood.
We wanted to make sure the parting line between the fender halves was as straight and clean as possible. So dad came up with a nifty way of doing this. He cut a 1/4" inch gap out of the fenders and made some 1/8" inch alignment pieces to weld back on each fender half. Pretty slick.
We're winding down on the fab work finally. Our next big step will be blowing the truck back apart and sand blasting the frame.
