Frenching Fools

The start

This sunday was the frenching fun on J’s Chevy. Frenching? In kustom car talk, that’s getting rid (actually covering) the chrome headlight rings, bringing the body line all the way flush to the headlights. A project to christen the newly set up air compressor and dedicated eletric outlets! I kind of anticipated this taking a while, so we planned on J showing up at 9:00AM. Soon after 9:00 was when J sneaked in, I didn’t hear the sled pull up! Anyway, we made a shopping run to Napa and City Mill for some supplies so it wasn’t till past 10:00 that we got the car into the garage and ready to start. First the headlights need to be removed. Polished rings are a snap fit and pop off. The main bucket that houses the entire light assembly needs to come off. The plan is that assembly is going to be mounted on the backside of the body metal instead of the front. So we go to start removing the bolts that hold the  buckets on. What the heck is that? I ask J. The bolt has a kinda squarish hole. Geeze! Was there a problem in the fifties of headlight bucket thefts? This thing looks like some funky security bolt like you see in bathroom stalls or equipment that you’re not supposed to take apart. Really now, what’s up with that? I have no bits or screwdriver that will fit. We won’t need these again, so J figures might as well drill them out. He starts on one. I dig around my tools looking for something that might fit. J’s still drilling. I grab my bits. Here J, try one of these with the fancy colored coating, they drilled through the stainless bar stock the other day for me. J switches and after some more drilling finally get’s through one.  He switches to my plug in corded drill. I hear more cussing. These things must be made of some metal so advanced it’s used on spacecraft! I found a square bit that looks like it’ll almost fit and then mod it with the Dremel. We try it with J’s cordless impact driver and with a cheer it works on the bolts on the other headlight! I fully understand J’s joy as I take a turn at attempting the bolts J was working on. I come to understand just how painfully slow it is to try and drill out these bolt heads. Were both amazed! Unfortunately it appears the drivers side is cursed and the kustom tool works on only one bolt. The rest don’t grab, the tool is toast. We figure we’ve got no choice to drill them out, so we head back to City Mill to get some high quality drill bits, and maybe try an easy out screw extractor. By this time it’s almost noon, so we decide we might as well grab lunch. As we cruise on over to Taco del Mar, J shares the thought of using Vice-Grips. Tht obvious choice had not occured to us till now.

When we got back and finished our monster burrito, J decided to give the Vice-Grips a go. Poped loose without a struggle, we were feeling pretty silly. Sheesh. At least we were saved the suffering of drilling out six more of these kryptonite bolts. We could now continue. Had to snip the wires to get the buckets completely out. Again, the drivers side was pretty munched, a wire with insulation gone, the bucket rusted. J had seen the Bondo work there, we now had a chance to see what was going on under the paint. Indeed there were holes filled in with plastic here. He cut out a wedge of the offending section with the Dremel. The call went out to Derek to pickup new headlight beams and a metal snip. J had forgotten his and we didn’t have anything to cut a clean sheet metal patch. Little did we know what pains Derek would have to go through to find these parts from the oh so knowledgable sales drones at that parts store, the partner to Chess. In the meantime we welded up the bolts to act as the new studs to mount the headlight buckets from behind.

Derek finally made it, after going to three stores. I start welding on the passenger side trim ring while J works his magic on the patch. And magic it is. With just a pair of aviation snips and two hammers, he sculpts out an amazingly nice fitting patch! Tack it in, nice! My welding skills still need work, this job is pretty challenging with the stainless steel trim rings being a lot thinner than the car body metal. I’m burning a good amount of holes. Its a trick figuring out how fast to move the welder, I get better eventually, but it’s not pretty. In any case, I don’t think those rings are coming off any time soon. J fine tunes the patch, and then I fill in the welds. Grind it down, and it doesn’t look half bad!

Gotta admit, not bad for a bunch of monkeys who don’t know exactly what they are doing. We get the driver side trim ring tacked up and while I set on it like a welding mad chimp, the boys mix up a batch of hairy bondo and start slapping it on the passenger side. The fiberglass filler has a lot more volume and structure and fills in the headlight gaps well. It looks kinda icky with all the strands, looks kinda like a pigeon nest. But after J hits it with the sander, it starts taking shape. I bit more filling, sanding and here you have it, a rough finished frenched headlight!

We’re left with another little problem to work out, the passenger side wires to light lost the strips of tape marking them, so we has to break out the multimeter and do a little testing to figure out the correct wires. Working that out, connecting and covering the wire that had lost its covering, almost twelve hours later, we are done. It looks pretty slick! It’ll need some more cleaning up, but were pretty proud with what we managed to turn out.