Aluminium Front End?

Stuartc

Stuartc

True Classic
7112D47A-6D6C-4647-9A92-E40BB39F6B63.jpeg

I stole this from another site but is an official X1/9 advert which sort of implies the front is aluminium construction rather than steel!
Hopefully someone else can shed some light on this fact BUT as far as I’m aware the only aluminium part on the front is the light buckets or am I missing something?
The majority of the front seems to “rust” like conventional steel!😂
 
Stuartc said:
View attachment 64520
I stole this from another site but is an official X1/9 advert which sort of implies the front is aluminium construction rather than steel!
Hopefully someone else can shed some light on this fact BUT as far as I’m aware the only aluminium part on the front is the light buckets or am I missing something?
The majority of the front seems to “rust” like conventional steel!😂
Click to expand...
The light buckets are either aluminum or zinc die casts. The rest is indeed steel.

Alcan was experimenting with joining methods for aluminum car body parts with rivets, welding and adhesives. They contracted with Bertone to build a small run of bodies parts in aluminum on the existing steel tooling and had them build them up into cars using the technology. As the aluminum thickness wasn’t ideal for the steel tooling (along with differences in stretch and other issues) the cars were not beautiful examples of an X. I believe they used annealed aluminum panels to form the parts and either tempered them individually after forming or after joining by heating them in the paint ovens.

At least one of the cars still exists in the former Bertone collection. Road and Track crashed one of the prototypes in a race at Nelson Ledges in the mid eighties.

Alcans work brought the various Audi’s made of aluminum (A2, A8 and others) and have enabled Tesla’s and other cars to be made of joined aluminum.
 
There's a previous old thread on the Alcan, but looks like some of the pictures have been eaten by postimg and photobucket 😮

Aluminum Fiat Bertone X1/9?

Does anyone know the story behind the aluminum frame/body? I think we've all saw the photo of 2 sexy women holding up an all aluminum X frame/body. It appeared in an ad of some sort. Can you imagine if they actually went through with this and constructed all x's out of aluminum? It would...
xwebforums.com
 
That all makes sense and I don’t have to worry they ran out of aluminium when my ‘88 was built☺️
 
kmead said:
The light buckets are either aluminum or zinc die casts. The rest is indeed steel.

Alcan was experimenting with joining methods for aluminum car body parts with rivets, welding and adhesives. They contracted with Bertone to build a small run of bodies parts in aluminum on the existing steel tooling and had them build them up into cars using the technology. As the aluminum thickness wasn’t ideal for the steel tooling (along with differences in stretch and other issues) the cars were not beautiful examples of an X. I believe they used annealed aluminum panels to form the parts and either tempered them individually after forming or after joining by heating them in the paint ovens.

At least one of the cars still exists in the former Bertone collection. Road and Track crashed one of the prototypes in a race at Nelson Ledges in the mid eighties.

Alcans work brought the various Audi’s made of aluminum (A2, A8 and others) and have enabled Tesla’s and other cars to be made of joined aluminum.
Click to expand...
Here is a photo of one that I took at the Volandia museum (current home of the Bertone collection):

3F299352-697B-4B48-8083-2856F984E386.jpeg
 
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