quick question: 74 headlight housing

quick question: on the head light housing, is the 74 gran torino a "one year only" thing??? (here is a pic of my right side  74,  note the grill mounts and the edge goes straight down)  

here is a pic of a 73 (it has a curve there)

as does the 75



Edited by californiajohnny - 19-October-2014 at 2:11PM

the top one's mine it's not messed up it's stripped down to the aluminum! but my left side one is cracked , i thought i'd just buy another good one cheap, but not finding any that are straight down like that right now, so i think i'll just have that one welded and use it, but i began thinking what about the grill? i bought a really nice used one a while back, so is it going to fit! well i looked at it and it has a 74 (D4OB) # on it so i should be fine!!

yup 72 and 73 are one offs each 74-76 are the same

Ah, so those are pot metal also? That was the way they formed odd shaped parts back then. That's a crappy material.

I'm sorry Randy, the only repair I've heard of for that metal was a soldering gun used to braze to it. I don't have any experience with it other than from having the headlight buckets of my old 72 GT cracked from a wreck, and it wouldn't bend back at all. These days everything is a plastic, and repairing that is tricky too.

Problem with this metal is that it goes from solid to liquid with no visible warning QUICKLY, and it is a really fluid metal when it melts... If it's bent, it's done. the metal fatigues when bent/bent back and it splits along the crystalline structure/grains in the metal. Epoxy/J.B. Weld would work on it, but you have to give the metal some "tooth" and have it really clean to get adhesion.