Misalignment of 8N front grille to body

[mokanman]

For most of the time that I have owned my 8N the front grille has been out of alignment with the body and has not been able to close/lock properly. I bought it in 1996 and at some point in the early years of ownership my foot slipped off the clutch after stopping while still in gear and ran into a farm gate which is probably when the problem began. Believe it or not, I didn't notice the alignment problem at that time as everything seemed okay. All these years I've been able to open and close the grille, albeit with some difficulty while seemingly "locked" in place when closed.

In early 2022 while I was brush hogging, however, unbeknownst to me the grille opened and gravity did it's thing. It somehow caught on the ground and flipped under the tractor (I did not see this happen as the tractor body hid all this from my view while I was seated) and was pulled off it's hinges. My brush hog did a bang up job on that grille! Needless to say the brush hog won that battle and that grille is bound for the scrap yard.

I bought a cheap replacement grille (this is a work machine, not for show) and as you can see by the pictures I am faced with the same problem, only worse. I can't get the grille closed at all. I'm hoping some of you experienced folks can give me suggestions on re-aligning things without having to take it to a body shop. I have been using it without a grille for a while but I have some areas on my property that need attention where it would be good to have protection for the radiator. I appreciate suggestions.

 

[mokanman]

It appears I also have photo alignment problems. I apologize for the bad placement of pictures vs words. I tried to get all the pictures underneath my text but I finally had to give up!

 

[ning]

Looks like it's slightly tweaked, parallelogram style instead of a good 90 degree rectangle.
Can you brace the bottom, like with it standing on the floor with a foot on either side of it and then you pull it up and to the right, push down slightly on the left corner?

 

[John0829]

It looks to me like the hood itself is tweaked to one side by the gap showing at the top of the dog leg. A hard push to toward the other side might move it back close.

 

[mokanman]

I appreciate the super quick replies and I apologize for not responding sooner but I never got an email notification of either of your posts. I just decided to log in and check for replies and wow, am I appreciative. I must have something set up wrong in my profile for notifications (or maybe they went to my email spam bucket though I get other emails from TractorByNet). Anyway, I'll go figure that out and fix it but again I wanted to thank you guys for the suggestions and I'll give those a try tomorrow!

 

[mokanman]

Haven't been able to determine why I did not get notified about your postings as I'm set up on the forum for email notifications when my threads have new postings. Also, my gmail did not have anything in the Spam folder. Guess I need to do some more research but meanwhile here is a photo my wife had on her phone from 2019. Not sure why she had this but it shows that the front was seemingly aligned okay though it is not a straight on shot.

then. Hmmmm