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Engine is out being built and car is going back today to get finished up. As I’m cleaning up last night, getting it ready to go back I noticed this? What is it? How would it break? Is it something they could have done pulling the motor? I have never seen this, and not sure if it’s been like this since I bought the car in 2002 and can see it now bc the motor is out? Or if this happened at the shop? The car hasn’t been drove since 2002 so it could have only happened in those two scenarios. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
To me it looks like there is rust around the area the screw is pulled through the brace. If that is rusty it would rule out a "recent" occurrence unless it was starting to rust and something knocked it loose. The cracks in the paint, and apparent rust underneath, also point to this happening some time back. The hair in there might indicate this happened from hitting an animal, there is still hair around the surrounding area too it looks like. Under my car, while working on the transmission and finding the side skirts mounts were all bent and battered, I fund a spot with dirt, dust, and longer animal hair! That points to a previous owner had ran over something and the screw caught a clump of hair and this was "preserved" when the car was jacked up improperly and folded the connection metal over the side skirt. Now if the is a person's hair, the damage would have been there before to allow it to get caught like that. The damage from the images just doesn't look recent to me.
Is the the brace between the noise cover and the radiator brace? It looks like some precision welding can fix it up after it is put back into the correct shape. That bubbled and cracked paint will need to come off and re-primered at the least to prevent it from rusting in the future. What ever it was that caused that it had to have been with a heck of a lot of force to pull the metal through like that.
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