After the ice thawed enough to make driving relatively safe, the junkyard in town finally opened up, allowing us to hit the place to be able to see what we can get from the couple of junked Trackers for our R&R. Luckily we found most of what we needed to make the complete fix.
We already had a replacement headlight housing, grille, fender and bumper skin from the old Tracker that I had saved just in case. Now the fender is a little flawed as it had dents that were knocked out as much as possible on the old truck during the fixes I did on it over a year ago. The bumper skin was really from a Suzuki Vitara, slightly different cosmetically, but still fitting nonetheless. The grille was complete but was damaged at the two hidden mounting points where plastic pegs hold the grille to the metal subframe. At the yard I was able to find a better fender that was black so the color contrast isn't too extreme. We also got the inner bumper and bumper skin that was intended for a Tracker, air filter box and the section of fender apron/subframe that I needed to have to replace the damaged section that I already cut out from the truck. Along with some other parts for a couple of other cars, that junkyard run netted us a good score. The first thing that I started was the fitting of the fender apron/subframe. This would involve trimming excess metal from the junkyard piece so it would fit in the space that I have on our truck. I had to try to get everything as precise as possible since the alignment of this piece will determine the alignment of the fender, grille, bumper pieces and headlight shell. After measuring and eyeballing the junkyard piece several times and trimming slivers of metal several times to get the piece lined up, I was finally able to get the piece in a position where everything looked even with decent accuracy. I went ahead and welded a light stream at the back portion of the panel to get the panel hung most of the way. From here I hung the fender on the subframe so I can make sure the mounting bolts lined up all around the fender to ensure the exterior panel would be fitting properly and not have any stress points or spots that might buckle. Everything looked good at the fender so the next point was to line up, fine tune, and weld up the front portion of the panel to the rest of the front subframe. In finishing up the fitting of the fender apron panel I had to mount the headlight housing since I would need to test fit the grille as well as see how the hood closes over all of this mess to ensure that everything is lined up before I did my final welds. With some minor trimming and some minor stretching of the original portion of the front subframe, I was able to get everything staged properly enough to be able to do the final weld around this portion to connect the old with the new. I left the headlight housing in place long enough to get most of the weld done around the portions not close to the mounting points since the metal would get hot enough to melt the plastic tab of the headlight housing. At this point I went ahead and mounted the bumper. I had to start off with the inner bumper, the metal section that takes the brunt of any impacts as well as holds the flimsy bumper skin. This large metal piece was held in with four bolts, two on each frame rail. This replacement panel went in pretty fast, allowing me to focus on hanging the bumper skin. The top of the bumper skin is held in with these special pegs that have a shell that pops in with an inner piece that expands this shell when its snapped in place. I don't have any of these pegs so I ended up using screws with nuts and washers along the top. I used 3 sets of fasteners to hold the top of the bumper skin in place. From there I was able to use the factory bolts to hold the rest of the bumper skin in place along the bottom, securing the piece properly. I snapped in the light sockets for the parking lights. From there I moved on to the grille. In fitting the grille in place, I had to figure out how I would attach the piece in place. Reason being the whole grille is hung in place with plastic pegs that snap in to hold the top of the grill down and two hidden mounting points that have pegs holding the grille in place. I don't have any of these pegs and the two hidden mounting points are damaged where even with the pegs, I wouldn't have been able to mount the grille at these two points. I ended up having to use some countersunk screws with nuts and washers to hold the top of the grille to the same mounting holes where the pegs would've gone. I then had to drill two holes, one on each side, into the plastic of the hidden mounting points, which then allowed me to use zip ties to hold the grille through these holes into the holes in the subframe where the pegs would've gone. After tightening the zip ties, the grille was pretty sturdy and solid. From here I moved to the inside of the fender apron/subframe panel, running along the line lengthwise. I had to trim some excess metal from both sides to get everything lined up with either side so I can do one good straight weld along the length of the seam. With a bunch of eyeballing, I trimmed enough metal from both sides to allow me to get the seam straight so I can get the weld in place. This was a way cleaner job than the patchup I did on the old Tracker. With all this done I moved on to the fuse box and air box. These just needed to be secured with the factory bolts as everything was taken apart without any damaging of the pieces. This went rather fast so on to the air box I went. From there I had to do some minor moving of one of the metal brackets that held a mounting point for the air box. With the air box secured with its factory bolts I mounted the top half of the box and attached the hose in place. Two of the snap on tabs were unable to be secured because the tab mounting points at these two corners were both damaged. I ended up manipulating the air hose in a way where it put downward pressure on the top half of the air box to hold the piece down against the bottom half of the box. With that, I just had to do some minor bending of the hood to get it straighter so when I closed the panel it would line up with everything. After doing this I was able to close the hood properly without any portion of the panel pushing or rubbing against anything. It turned out even better than I thought despite the few minor flaws in the panel from the accident damage. With that I put the battery back in and fired the truck up to ensure everything was still working properly. I put air in the right front tire since it was flat and with that, I had the Tracker back in service once again.
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