But he does have a valid point. The pitfalls of a part time shop and a day job that sends me on far too much travel.
Robert, when you reach the point of calling it done, will you or the owner planing on entering the car in any of the major shows? like the Detroit Autorama Riddler Award or great 8? The car has turned out as nice as any of pro built cars from the past. HRP
Danny, I’m fairly certain it will head to Tri-five nationals, Jalopyrama, and a few that are more local.
An incredible job you have done, and to length that you have gone to show us how is much appreciated. Please keep it up.
Even though I shake my head at those that think showing off a crap rod, or a neglected Barn find or a car in bare metal for the sake of Look at Me! I almost feel bad that all this excellent fabrication and repair is being covered up by paint, upholstery and plating. Robert, it sounds like you know your way around a flat screen or two. So, I hope you will develop a slideshow display/presentation of some of the million or so pictures and the million or so of hours { probley not all billable! If they were, tell me your bookkeeper's name! lol} I have been following your progress for the better part of 20 years since the old tri five days. Always with growing respect and admiration of your talent's. Larry
Thanks for all the comments guys!! Some equipment repairs were in order over the New Year's break, our tried and true Lathem time clock in the shop had given up the ghost. In speaking to Lathem, this model has been obsolete for some time and the only parts available are the print ribbon and a replacement motor. Doesn't help me with this little part... Quite used to this lack of availability in car parts, how hard can it be? A $1.99 package of music wire from Hobby Lobby and some round nose pliers, we are back in business.... Never underestimate what you can do with a pair of needle nose pliers Next on the list, I had received a pair of Fairmount wire edge pliers for Christmas, which had quite a twist to the handles where it was difficult for the catch to swing over the adjacent handle: Since these aren't available for return at the local hardware store (obsolete), and also since they are drop forged, I decided to do some heating and twisting. The Meco torch was used to bring the handles to a light tan color.... and a twisting device employed with a bit of tension via ratchet strap as the handles cooled... ....and here's a video showing their use on a test sample. These do a nice job of locking the wire tight to the flange as you stake and wrap the wire.. Finally, since the artist in the family had asked a few months ago, looking for a canvas to paint, I pointed her to the Lennox. Here is the layout on the one side in Sharpie in prep for painting.. As far as the wagon, we are still here, back to one of the more boring stages..... applying epoxy primer and making black dust on the floor... And in the planning stage for one of the trim details, the owner had ordered a ball milled dash insert for the wagon many months ago, which was far too 1990's billet. So naturally I breathed a sigh of relief when it did not fit the dash contour. (go figure) I was leaning toward an engine turned panel as it is more of a hotrod flavor. Unfortunately, it is more of a TRADITIONAL hot rod flavor, and we were in the gray area there as well. So in the meantime, a buddy has a shop in Wilmington DE, and does absolutely fabulous detail work (had a hand in the Double Bubble wagon's fabrication), and has been using this ribbed stainless sheet for dash inserts and other details.. (his picture and work) This gives a nice classy and timeless look that is a better fit to the flavor of the car we have, so that is the direction we're headed... So to test a theory in adding a finished edge around the perimeter, we broke out the false wire edge Pullmax dies and installed them in the Lennox for a test run on some 19 gauge stainless. The "backstop" was setup to be just shy of a full wrap, which should give us a slight gap for the ribbed stainless to slide into. Our edge strips will be "outfitted" with some hidden press studs to hold it in place on the dash. A little bit of polishing and that may just work.....
They were twisted enough that the retaining clip was difficult to get it to drop over the next handle. I would think it was many years of use/abuse that brought it to that condition, and not the original design. Or I just really F'd up an original tool.
More blocking, then more epoxy... Another hurdle in the way of running our wiring under the dash, we need to address the defrost vents for the Vintage Air unit. What they send is cheesy at best, and given they only send two vents where Chevy installed 4, we're going to go another route.. The factory piece does take up quite a bit of real estate, and now interferes with the raingear wiper system and the VA heater box. So all things considered, we plan on using the original vent top portion and adapt tubing in the equation to make use of a more flexible hose arrangement. The VA has two 2" outlets at the top for defrost, so we will use a 2" tube to feed the center two vents, and 1-1/4" tubes to feed to the outer vents. Missed some of the details with that one, a bit more for the center vent.. Forming our transition from 2" to 1-1/4"..... As the ports from the VA point almost straight up, the 2" tubes were welded at a slight incline to remove any sharp bends in the supply hose. .....as a follow-up, our local artist has been working on the other side of the Lennox.. and we have been working with some local hippies to explore other shop shirt options.. This was done on the yellow shop shirt so naturally that base color limits what results you will get...
In adapting our defroster vents for the wagon, we needed to add a bead in the tubing to better retain the hose attached. The beading die we made for this purpose on the bead roller was too large to fit the 1-1/4" tube, so another tool is in order.. Our worn out Southbend was used to make the round profiles, with a step in the bottom die to act as a backstop for better consistency in bead placement. I don't have much in the form of hardened tool steel for making specialized cutters for the lathe, so I used a 3/4" square cutter from the Lennox to form the following for making the concave shape.. the male counterpart was done on the fly... The 4140 square stock was squared on both ends, then a relief added for our round profile to rest in. Our c-clamps had a VEE notch that would assist in keeping the round bits from moving, so that was used in lieu of a vise.. The infinitely adjustable clamps worked well, the TIG was used to add a fusion weld around the perimeter (no filler rod) After welding, the assembly is heated to a straw color (pre-blue) and dipped in our official Mickey Thompson fluid container (transmission fluid) to harden things up a bit. Here are the dies in use, take note of what happens when you don't keep pressure against the backstop.... No harm no foul, a couple more passes cleans it right up... That should help to keep the hose in place...
After a long hiatus of hanging TV's for the day job, so...where we had left off on the wagon, more blocking of primer, fabrication/modification of defroster vents, and wiring.. So a test fit of our fuse panel mounting plate (American Autowire) found that along with our parking brake pedal assembly location and the close proximity of the Raingear wiper motor, things were much too snug. So in looking at the room available under the dash, just to the right of the brake pedal looked promising but one of our newly formed defroster tubes interfered. This one hung down too low.... And, in typical domino fashion, the fuse panel mounting plate would not work where it was not intended. We made a new bracket of 1/8" aluminum, and bent some mounting ears to be able to place it well above the accelerator linkage. We also designed it to use existing hardware to minimize any additional holes through the nicely painted firewall. Next, the interfering defrost duct was shortened to provide the needed clearance. Side note: Check out the HAZ difference between a TIG tack on tight fitting panels vs. having to add filler on a slight gap... Fitted before we do the final welding, this shows to leave us sufficient room... And now for the fun part....
While we're getting prepared for wiring installation, the instrument cluster was dug out of its box to help us see where all the wiring was going. And there it was in all it's billet glory. This will kinda clash with the ribbed stainless trim we're using for the dash insert, so let's look at adding it to our gauge cluster as well... Where this gauge cluster was designed with a flush fit in mind, we need to be able to hide the cut edge of the ribbed stainless. So the holes were opened up slightly where the gauge could be installed from the front, and the bezel will now hide our cut edges.. The stainless is in a rather raw form, and to give it more pizazz, perhaps some polishing is in order... So we used some Trizact products on the DA, and ended things on the buffer... Here's how it turned out... We also have some new indicator lights coming for the high beam and turn signals to get away from the tiny LED's that also scream billet.. The new lights should hopefully be here Saturday where we can get this modification wrapped up this weekend..
Today we had a back up and punt moment. The nice chrome bezel on the gauges is far too large to fit in those corners of the instrument panel bezel from the outside. So we'll have to keep it on the backside, but that doesn't help us cover up the cut edge of the hole in the ribbed stainless.. ......so let's make some stainless "eyelets" to both hold the ribbed stainless securely to the billet panel, as well as give us a finished edge around the cut hole.. First a punch and die will be needed to press one side of our eyelet. and we added a 1/2 x 1/2 tang to hold the punch in the press brake... Back to the south bend to cut out our flange lip.. The punch was snug after the press operation, so it was used as a holding fixture for the trimming operation. A holesaw in the drill press started the holes for the gauges and then we used our Jigsaw with cruise control to fine tune the openings. A sheet of phenolic gives us a non-marring surface to pound on, the Snap-on linear stretch hammer swages the flange over and a 1/2" diameter round makes a good punch to flatten out the rest. Finished "eyelets" Still have to install the indicator lights, but since I need to pack up for the local car show tomorrow in Leonardtown, we'll finish that up this coming week.
Thanks Bruce!! We did a test fit of the instrument panel in the car to see what it looked like with the green backdrop... This stainless will be the same material used in the dash insert "band" that goes from side to side, as well as the insert for the console. Should add some pizazz to the interior... Here's the view with our Alpinetech indicator lights added.... Our OEM retainers for the bottom of the curved side glass had one piece with a bracket broken off. These brackets serve as a place to screw/attach the garnish moldings. The broken piece was removed and the spot welds ground smooth... A new piece was cut out of some 19 ga steel and the Diacro press brake made short work of repeating 45* bends. The new part was media blasted, TIG welder used to plug weld things back together, more media blasting and some epoxy mixed up and brushed on using an acid brush. On to our glass installation, we had picked up some 3M strip-calk to seal the rubber to the glass. We found that the full width strip provided a bit too much and some oozage ensued... First is always the messy one, right? So we laid the following ones on the glass and cut down the middle for a more narrow strip.. More better.... So then a person gets cocky and needs a reality check on the driver's side.... Eh, good a stopping point as any..
Robert, I hope that broken glass is flat! As always your work is impressive, the broken glass proves you have a lot in common with the rest of us! HRP
Thanks much!! OK, long overdue for an update.. Playing some more with our dash insert, this should look good.. We attempted different processes for folding the hemmed edge trim, but alas none gave a good consistent finish. So some stainless strips were dropped off at Triton metals, a local machine shop we have used before... They will get much better results, still waiting on completion. Back to our problem child of a window, this crack occurred as I slightly pried rearward with a metal rule. Exactly where I pried. To limit the excess squeezed out of the seals on our next glass, we took the 3M strip-calk in its original form and sliced right down the middle.. Here's a video showing installation of the strip-calk, and another with installation of the seal over the strip-calk. https://youtube.com/shorts/41FgeNHBBa0?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/hQxR2nUTVSs?feature=share Installing window #2, we had a slight tight area and I asked Jared to push outward and that's when we had a repeat of Groundhog Day.. So, maybe the pry the first time was not the only issue. Fast forward so we can look back, last night we did a dry fit of the garnish moldings around these windows and found that the tack strips holding the headliner were far too thick and pushed the moldings down so far that the back side would be visible through the glass. In addition, this was also pushing downward on the window and seal while we were attempting the installation. When we had installed the quarter panel previously, we used plug welds inside this window opening and some had a slight proud. Nothing that I was concerned with at the time and considering had the tack strip been the correct thickness it likely wouldn't have been an issue now. But with the headliner pushing downward, the seal was hanging up on one of the plug welds as Jared was pushing outward on the corner, which made a perfect fulcrum effect for crack #2. Since we aren't pulling a headliner out, we went ahead and cleaned up the plug welds. This meant taping off all the nice pretty paint on the outside and the interior as well.. All of the welds cleaned up, we mixed up some SPI epoxy and used a small brush to add three coats on the bare areas. And to counter the effect of the garnish molding hanging too low, we will now need to make some one-off upper clips that are half height of the ones we just ordered (and have been waiting 4 months to arrive), in order to get the molding up and out of sight when looking through the glass. Story of my life.. Window #3!! We had length issues from the last replacement, let's check this one as well. Hooking our tape measure on the apex of the pointy end, the original ordered with the rest of the glass set shows to be 40-1/16 in length. The new replacement, like the last one (#2), was 40-5/16. So we have a 1/4" to remove. So we consulted my glass expert John Glenn the last time we did this, and got the rundown of the various methods we could possibly use. Since I'm more of a go slow and sneak up on the end goal, I opted for using Cubitron belts on our Dynabride sander. It did a better job of taking down corners so we followed the process discussed in the next video. Then when we had reached the size needed (three hours later), a 320 grit disc on the DA gave a more polished appearance. Our installation last night went in relatively painless and crack free. Now to make some upper clips..
The Jalopy Journal
