Headlight Trim Rings

For those of you that have closely looked at pictures of my car, you will have noticed that there has always been a headlight trim ring on one side or the other missing.  When I bought the car, the two headlight rings were mis-matched and one was bent up a little.  One time when I was down at Grand Prix (old name for Ferrari of Seattle), I went through their 'old' parts shelf and found a ring that looked close to being right and bought it.  It turns out that it had almost the right profile, but was too large around.  So I decided to take a section out and braze the two ends back together.

As you can see in the picture on the left, the inner part of the front ring is narrower and curved down more on the original ring in front but the side profile was correct.  The right picture shows the size tracings from an original (thanks to Lowell Brown) and the gap that I removed to get the ring down to the right outside diameter.

Here's the gap closed up and then after I brazed the two ends together.  I still need to re-drill the weep hole as it got filled in during the brazing.  I also had to remove about 1/4" from the inner flanges at both the front and rear so the inner diameters were correct.  Now I have to fill in the imperfections using Solder-It and then clean and polish up everything so it can be chromed.

The dented ring that came with the car was an original, but was in sad shape.  I made it worse by trying to fill in the problems with brass.  So now I'm left to making a new 6" section, removing the damaged part and brazing the new section in.  Here you can see the damaged area and the piece of brass that I'll shape to replace it.

I'll update this article with the results in a week or two.

Well, this has the best kind of ending.  I've gotten two NOS trim rings, so I just need to get them chromed as they suffered from shelf wear while sitting at Ferrari UK for 35 years.

You can see them sitting on the tracings I made from Lowell Brown's original rings.  They fit perfectly.