Ray, from looking at your photo, I believe the grill bottom needs to go back towards the cab a little bit, and it may also need to drop down slightly. The firewall to hood, and the hood to grill shell both need to have a uniform clearance or it throws the entire look of the truck off. This is important because the grill shell and the cab relationship puts everything on the front end in position.
Do you have the lower grill section? On the 1/2 ton, the lower grill section bolts to the top part of the grill, then the front of the fenders bolt to both pieces. this will pretty much put the wheels into the proper position on the truck, which will likely be farther forward in the wheel opening then it appears to be in your picture. I believe your front fenders are sitting too far forward. On a big truck, the rear end of the front fenders were under the doors, you may have to shorten the length of the fenders to clear the opening doors, but the 1/2 ton fenders cleared the doors.
On my 39, I ended up using a champion aluminum radiator for a 50-54 Chevy truck. It is narrow and tall, more narrow then the original Dodge truck radiator. That radiator fit entirely inside the dodge truck grill, as far forward as I could get it. I had to trim off some of the outer ends of the tin work from the inside of the grill slots to have clearance so they wouldn't rub against the radiator.
I don't have very many of the pictures I took left from the 39 build, most got lost in a couple back to back computer crashes, and the site the build was on appears to now be defuncted. These 4 are the best I can do, The first two (a left and a right shot) show how far into the grill shell the radiator sat. That is a Magnum 5.9 (360) motor. Also notice the in hose radiator fill. The radiator cap is 3-4" inches forward of the front edge of center of the hood.
In the 2nd two pictures(left and right sides) of the grill shell you can see in the top of the grill shell openings the amount of material I trimmed out for radiator clearance. Also notice, the bottom of the grill shell is not a factory piece. Under the chrome grill center piece is a fabricated piece of sheet metal because I wasn't running front fenders. That lower piece kind of has the look of the old steam train engine cattle movers. I still have that lower grill section here if you need one. The front of the fenders bolt to it. .
I built brackets out of 1/8" flat stock and welded them to the top of the frame, then added brackets to bolt the radiator to those brackets. The grill shell then bolts to the radiator support. Things were very tight there. I'm sorry I don't have pictures of that. The biggest deal there was to be sure the center of the grill shell was in line with the center of the cab, the frame rails are NOT centered with the cab, the frame is offset about 2" towards the passenger side. When you make bumper brackets, you will have to accommodate for that offset with the bumper brackets as well. I managed it with everything out in the open, it should be easy under the original lower grill piece in place. Gene
