BE Body repair advice

[mightymidget]

My bugeye was in a bad front wreck at some point, the body man repaired the hood with 1" thick shaping bondo, headlight buckets welded in, bad rust under bondo from heating metal to stretch and shrink, its bad.

I have purchased a bonnet off EBAY that the wings and lower valance were rusted. center section is good.

Has anyone ever replaced just the center section of hood. looks like basically bolted together.

I told the seller just to sawsaw the wings an lower valance off then send me the center section.

I guess I should have found this out before I purchased it, I didn't see it until it was about over, but I got it for $50.00

 

[spritenut]

This sounds like a candidate for a de-seaming job.
The center section is welded to the wings but through the beading which is a tee shaped moulding.
It's a bit tough to just cut the center out.
But anything is possible. I fabricated the whole bottom 1/3 of a bonnet from sheet metal because the bonnet was laying out in the dirt for 30 years and the bottom 1/3 was gone.
I have de seamed 3 bonnets now and one tail end with great results.
Weld it together every 4 inches, then go back and weld in between at 2" then again at 1", I did fill the gap with lead instead of bondo.
But I did use bondo to get the curves just right.
I also did one by welding a 2" wide piece of sheet metal over the seam, a little more bondo work on the edges but it came out fine too.

 

[mightymidget]

How do you take center and sides apart at beading. Do you drill spot welds out, like the other body parts?

 

[Gray_Cat]

You are correct, need to drill out the spot welds holding the bonnett altogether. I started this process awhile back and kinda wish I had done as Frank suggests and just deseam the bonnett and the rear deck as well. I'm so far into the project though I'm going to go ahead and separate the fenders from the center bonnett and install the new strips between them.
Roy

 

[mightymidget]

Yea my beads in the rear are really nice, so I will diffentantly want to keep the fronts. My car is never going to be a jewel but I do want it to look good