Early bonnets had their flanges spot-welded to the outer skin, but Jaguar soon switched to bonding these flanges with a strong adhesive. I assume that this not only simplified and sped up assembly, but also eliminated the need to excessive finish work to be completed on the bonnet before it could be painted.
The flanges usually need attention, and these were no exception – rust, crash damage, and several rounds of adhesives had taken their toll on these. If your flanges are beyond repair – as is often the case – we offer a complete NEW set of these flanges in our online store.
Here are the flanges as they were removed from the bonnet - pretty ugly, but salvageable.
Each flange has the adhesive scraped off (not easy!), and is bead blasted bare.
This is the flange from the forward edge of the RH inner valance, which was especially mangled. With the patterns for the perfect curvature and our shrinking, stretching, and smoothing machines, we can easily restore this flange to it's correct shape.
And here it is - good as new!
These flanges were also straightened and smoothed. Once they go back into the glass bead cabinet for a dust-off of the tooling marks and fingerprints, they will be indistinguishable from new.
These center section to wing brackets were also all wrinkled up - they are now DEAD FLAT - only the proper machinery can produce that result - and we have it!
This is a set of NEW bonnet flanges from Monocoque Metalworks. If your flanges are badly twisted, or badly deteriorated with serious cancerous rust (which is very common) - a set of our flanges will save you time, and trust me, ALOT of frustration. The shape and curvature of our flanges is EXACT, and the job of assembling the bonnet will be much less of a hassle. They are available as a complete set in our online store, or we also off a set for just the four wing flanges, which are the most prone to badly rusting.
