One of my front wings has a problem. With everything bolted down correctly, battery box (RHD so in left wing) etc., there is a slight concavity in the wing between A-post and wheel arch. There’s no rust, and no sign of accident damage, but this looks like tin-canning, where the metal can ‘pop’ into either in or out position. Here, it sits popped ‘in’ and won’t stay ‘out’ - see photo.
Is there a cure for this? I see options as:
leave it and accept as ‘Jaguar’
gentle remedial work from the inner panels with a jack and load-spreading board
let the painter level it with filler
weld a thicker strip to the back of the wing panel to hold the outer skin in the convex position.
Any advice gratefully accepted.
I’ve seen the stainless shrinking discs on youtube clips, but they seem to be used on more specific dents. I can’t see any dents here - there’s no creased or folded metal, just a very gentle depression over a large area. Would a 4.5" shrinking disc work here?
Once the paint’s on it will be the thing that bugs hell out of you every time you look at it. Bad as it appears to you now it will be magnified tenfold once the area takes on a high shine. Even a depression of a few mils in a large almost-flat area like this will show up like a beacon once the paint is on.
Won’t work. Will make it worse.
Filler is not a solution for tin canning. Cracking a definite risk.
See answer to #2.
This is a very common condition that’s difficult to remedy. I’ve seen very few XKs with perfectly crowned front wings. When you have tin-canning (we call it oil-canning on this side of the pond) it’s because there’s slightly too much metal occupying a given area. There may actually be a simple solution, which I’ll get to in a moment, but it’s more likely
and inevitably also from the outside as you go along. In order for a shrinking disc to work, however, the steel on both sides needs to be bare. This is a large, essentially unsupported piece of sheet metal and the tin-canned area is under local compression. That compression is applying stresses to the entire panel that may actually be holding it in otherwise straight position. When relieved there’s a possibility, a likelihood even, that the tin canning effect will shift to another spot and you’ll end up consuming a whole lot of time chasing the problem, and possibly making the situation worse.
The best I could achieve was a final elevation a sixteenth of an inch below grade in small, localised areas strewn across the entire side of the car which were filled with a very thin skim of polyester glaze to bring to level. It looks like you’re not too far off that mark so if you’re able to carefully torch shrink that low spot from the inside just enough to remove the spring effect you might be well advised to stop there and then allow the painter to perform the final levelling with a touch of glaze, your solution #3.
The simple solution just might be to shim out the low spot if it happens to be over the wing mud guard, then fix it place with a strong polyester sealer like sikaflex. I would try that first.
Thanks all. Having spent several days sorting and fitting the battery box, I had forgotten that I don’t have the splashguard underneath fitted. I’ll get that bolted in and see if it has any effect, then experiment as Nick has suggested.
I’m not convinced any shrinking process will improve this much as there is zero damage of any kind to the metal, and therefore nowhere obvious to start. The depressed area is large, has very gradual edges and is only about 1/16 - ⅛" deep at the most.
I’ll report back! - but it may take a while, as I have to rebuild the old Land Rover’s engine sometime soon…
Consider a steel rule flat on a table between 2 heavy bricks. Move a brick towards the other just 1mm and watch the rule. It doesn’t take much to cause an oil-can dent, so it shouldn’t take much to fix it either.
I would try this: clamp a row of large C clamps at the bottom of the fender (above the curve) and hang weight on each until the oil-canning stops. Move the weight around, try a few ‘pulls’ from the front too if you can. Work your way down to the least weight at the fewest spots while still getting a fix. You now know where there’s extra material needing to be ‘relaxed’. You can do this with soldered posts and a hydraulic ram, but for illustration’s sake, C-clamps will do.
In the most extreme case (on an MGA front fender, damned near identical in cross-section) I cut a relief slit, then pulled the cut edges together with handles soldered on, then stitched up the defect. This is a rather extreme example but it does illustrate the effect you’re looking to achieve.
OR— if I wasn’t as far along as you seem to be, I’d heat a dime-sized area almost red hot in the middle of the area and quench quickly with cold water. A spiral of ‘dimes’ radiating out will be required until the oil-canning stops.
