Monday, October 24, 2011

Days 58 - 66: More cleaning/scraping/grinding, welding the floor pans, and the car claims another hand!

So for the past 8 days we've been on and off cleaning the car, this is taking forever. I guarantee you if i ever do another one of these I'm shipping it out to be blasted because this is just ridiculous.

We got most of the seams around the floor pan done. Basically at some point someone put in new floor pans and instead of welding it, riveted and bolted it into place. We wanted to get rid of all the rivets and bolts on this unibody and make sure that everything is welded instead.

Here's some pictures of that process:

The first thing we did was disassemble the upper part of the front suspension that we dry built. Since the lower A arm and strut are assembled, leveled, and lubed properly, we left them in place and wrapped them in foil so they wouldn't get damaged:



After that we spent some time working on cleaning the engine bay up and everything related to the floor pan seams:






We removed the "z clutch bar" bracket..



We also started to remove the rear torque box that's rusted out, we're gonna be replacing the entire thing on both sides. Basically creating a brand new front and rear and we'll hold them together with brand new frame rail connectors. This ensure that's all the weight of the car is being held up with all new suspension, all new rear, and all new frame rails and torque boxes, properly welded to the rest of the uni-body. No corner cutting here (well, except where we physically literally cut out the corners...)





Then Jesse came and welded some floor pans! Oh but about 30 seconds into hitting a spot with the grind wheel to clean...


The car claimed another piece of finger... haha

Here's what he got done after we wrapped that up:







After he started to weld the seams he drilled out all the old rivets and bolts and then welded the holes close. This week we will be grinding down his welds so once it's painted it will all look flush! No more frankenstein looking bolts everywhere!






That's it for now! More to come...

1 comment:

  1. Looks great man. I've never seen a tag like that, with the VIN and trim codes and stuff.

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