I used a chemical stripper to remove the paint. This revealed some interesting light surface rust damage that had occured under the metal banding that was used to
ship the bonnet assembly. In the pictures you can make out the one that went down the center. You can see the marks from the bands that wrapped around the side in the pictures
of the front wings that follow.
I started out the repair by pounding out the big jambs using a variety of hammers, rubber mallets and plastic mallets. Then using the old school, pre-bondo, technique that my
father showed me, I used a pick hammer and a flat body file to flatten out the dents. This took me quite a lot of time. As you can see in the last picture above, the bonnet center
had come out damn good. I could have saved myself $500 if I had tried this earlier.
Since I was planning on taking some time off from working on the project for the summer, I primed the bonnet center section with DP50LF Epoxy Primer to protect it until I was ready to continue working on it
again.
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