Projects Modified Lakester Build (THUNDERCASKET)

I like that table! Northern Tool?

 

Got some new hoist chains on the leveler and got the body up finally. Now I can get at the frame again finally (and clean that side of the shop a little).




Spider-manned some straps underneath to keep it stable and a bit safer to work around.


Today I'm going to start getting the rear boxing plates cut and possibly even tacked in. Then I can figure out what I'm going to use for the K bracing to the F1 crossmember.

As for cleaning the shop goes, I am finally doing that. I have been doing nothing but work to the car to the exclusion of all else out there for a long time now and the entropy hit near critical mass. It is still a jungle gym in there but I have clear paths around things and access to tools now. I still have loads to do and many things that need homes (which is not my strong suit, obviously).

It is indeed. I got it through Amazon though because NT wanted like $40 to ship it from their site and I had points I could use on Az with free shipping so it cost me very little. It's the most entry level fixturing table on the market but still a major upgrade for me and anybody who could use something like it but doesn't necessarily need high precision flatness or holes on the sides. I am not sure if the hole sizes or spacing are standard or some metric oddball that won't match up easily to other fixturing tools. I do know that the hole spacing for my bench vise will not jive with the table so I am going to have to figure something else out for that since I have torn out my old pos benches that I made out of trash bathroom vanities this week.

 

I saw a similar one in the new Grizzly catalog. I could replace my bigger inside welding table with one of those and have more room in the heated shop.

 

You can always tell a car that Dennis built whether its a Rod or a race car. Always top notch, and always FAST

 

@patmanta do I see proposed vintage licks running down the body...your build certainly reaches back to the days where they were gracing postwar Hotrods

 

A day that should have come several years ago has finally arrived. I have begun boxing the rear of the frame.

The fab table has been super helpful already and I wish I got one years ago.



Chased out the sag in the expected spot and got things tacked together on the passenger side. I will hit the other side todayish. Once that's done, I can flip the frame over and get the underside welded nicely. At some point I need to figure out a K member to the F1 crossmember. But once this stuff is done, I am pretty close to the end of the tunnel finally.

Yeah, Grizzly has a light one too. It does not include the fixturing starter kit that the little Klutch table comes with though. If the big table spends most of its time as a catchall or otherwise sitting unused, I would consider it. I would suggest the Klutch if you want to hit the ground running because the basic fixturing stuff is all there.

Yes, you do. I laid a light mist of white primer down the side to block it out a little and see how I felt about it. All the paint is going to get taken off anyway so why not? I'm still planning to try out the T-boned ghost scheme I roughed out on a 40 in Forza on my Xbox. I thought I had posted it here but I guess I held back. I got the inspiration from a Halloween towel at Target that reminded me a little of rubber band style early animation. Taking that inspiration and applying it to early postwar flamejobs on lakes cars, I came up with this and I like it.



Makes a neat lampshade too.

 

I've heard of ghost flames but you have proven that Ghost may have meant something different back in the day as they really do look like a sideways ghost

Just ditch the face...what's in a shape eh...Curbspeeds flames come to mind...

Enjoying the progress...tell me there's a beam upstairs straddling your ceiling beams with that eye bolt through it...that your block and tackle is connected to...

I know the body isn't that heavy but your still working under it...your shop has a vintage look to it...

 

Face or nothing. This is happening..

There is a 12' beam up there that spreads the weight across the joists. It didn't even creak.

 

Perfect & Perfect...

 

"Yeah, Grizzly has a light one too. It does not include the fixturing starter kit that the little Klutch table comes with though. If the big table spends most of its time as a catchall or otherwise sitting unused, I would consider it. I would suggest the Klutch if you want to hit the ground running because the basic fixturing stuff is all there."

That's it, a "catchall" and it could largely do it's good work outside. At worst the smaller one will be a smaller "catchall". It really looks handy and might even let me take the wood working bench to my son's garage in Reno. He built it in high school woodshop and now has his own place for his own tools.
Ordered one!

 

OK, Got the other side tacked in and started playing around with ideas for bracing the crossmember and back of the frame. I tried some cutout pieces from a 38 frame but they kinda looked like lumpy socks every way I clamped them in so I moved on to some heavy 3x2 angle I got with this in mind and didn't like that either.



After scouring my shop for another hour, I finally found where I hid my 2" angle iron and I've decided I like that the best. My logic here is that I've seen a lot of angle iron on old hot rods (and not much in the way of box tube), it seems to fit, I have it, it should function, it is comparable thickness material, and it should go together fairly easy and with few cuts. I may add more to it later but I think this is a good direction.



Then I boxed up one of the rear crossmember braces and called it quits. Tack welds, forged clamps, and the BFH.

Oh, it won't be, but the new mantra is 'close enough is good enough' after all

I think that is a stellar plan and will help you make progress in your shop. Clearing out a catchall and making room for something new in your shop is a great way to do some cleaning. I have used mine new table every day this week. I caught myself leaving things on it today and I am about to head back out to clear it now that I'm not starving anymore. I am finding it as or more useful for a cutting on things than my bench vise. You won't want to put stuff on it. Just cut a piece of plywood for the shelf tray it has and put related items there.

 

Well, things are floor to ceiling in the shop now.



Lowes had a 2 for 50 deal on these folding sawhorses. They're 43" wide and each hold 1100lbs. I had no idea big box store sawhorses had come so far. These are just what I needed and they'll tuck away when I'm done. Getting the frame up on them by myself was a little ugly and I am kinda glad nobody saw me.



Whatever works, right? If I wasn't so excited to get to this stage, I might have thought to chock the wheels a bit better instead of just cussing at them.

On NYE I was making great progress until I ran out of shielding gas. I will never regret having that $80 HF flux welder; all I needed to do to be able to flip the frame over and get it up on the horses was tack this one piece on and it did the job without having to pull the 10lb spool out of my HOBART to swap it for flux core (it makes a big mess with flux core anyway). I do have that little thing upgraded with a heavy clamp and a tack weld offset tip so I'm cheating some.



Not wanting to do any more than I had to with the flux core, I had to wait until Monday morning to get gas, and I didn't feel like doing more much needed cleaning and organization in the shop so... LIGHTENING HOLES IT IS!

In hindsight, I wish I had a 2" HoleDozer (these are fantastic bits BTW) but the 1.5" and 1" look good enough even if I did spend all day shaving like, ONE pound from the front of the frame.

Here is the towel I mentioned as being one of my inspirations for the ghost flames:

 

WOW! Substantial progress. Do you have a plan for rust removal on the entire frame and getting rust inhibitor (paint) into the boxed areas? I see dipping my entire frame in a citric acid bath before paint.

 

Yesterday I hit it pretty hard with a flap disc which is not going to take it all off. I was mostly cleaning and smoothing the areas I needed to lay more tacks into. Later on I'm going to go back at it to get it cleaner and start laying finish welds in finally.

As for the inside, I may end up just coating it. It is too cold now to set up a Citric Acid bath outside. I've been making progress, but I didn't make it fast enough to catch the 60º weather. It would have been nice, but I think I will be OK with an internal coating product. I have some of this Eastwood stuff handy.

https://www.eastwood.com/eastwood-internal-frame-coating-14oz-aerosol.html

 

LOTS OF WELDING
LOTS OF GRINDING

I've never seen so much ferrous dust on the floor. I got the bottom side of the boxing plates welded in and ground flat. I'm getting a little better at it; I am way out of practice laying much more than tacks and small runs. I'm looking to flip it over and start on the top today. Then the plan is to coat it with Rust Bullet and do a light fill on some of the ugly without taking it so far as to give it a plastic look.

It has hit me again how close I am getting to a yard drive. Once this is done, the list gets a lot shorter.

 

Lots more welding. Lots more grinding. De-tabbing finally done. Everything is closed up now.





I had to just cover where the old crossmember was but at least my welds are getting just a little nicer. All of them are penetrating but golly are a lot of them ugly. I think I need a light on my MIG torch because I have a lot of trouble seeing sometimes.

Some spots here and there to clean up still but I am largely done with a lot of the welding and grinding work. I'm going to gusset the crossmember and make new mounting tabs for the radiator support before I flip it over again to close up the underside of those plates I just put in up front. You will also notice I've fish plated the rear kick and that my garage door spring is lying on the ground (likely why the door opener isn't working, so, mystery solved there).

I will be glad when I get to a point that I can lay down the first coat of white Rust Bullet and a skim of filler to take some of the ugly down a notch before I do a second coat or so.

At some point I'm going to drop the body back down and start re-thinking how the back interfaces with the rear crossmember because I am not satisfied with what I've done so far. But there are a lot of little massaging jobs to be done on the body still so all in due time. I'm going to keep pushing though because I want to be ready for the engine and re-assembly by spring (hopefully).

 

What is this grinding you speak of?


Sorry Pat I couldn't help myself.

 

LOL, yeahhhh, my MIG welds are too ugly to live.

But mostly I ground them to keep my rails mostly flat. I should probably set my TIG up again and try the handle switch method (the pedal with the Eastwood TIG 200 AC/DC is awful)

 

Some people can use their weld beads like pin striping. Im lucky if mine hold things together.

 

Lots more ugly welding and grinding over the past couple weeks.
I decided the way I had the radiator support attach to the crossmember was stupid and in the way so I cut it off and went through it instead. This is much cleaner and there's plenty of clearance for the bolt on the spring side.



I'm not sure quite why, but I was driven to rivet these tabs in instead of trying to weld them. Probably because they are kind of nice and my welds are still rather unattractive. I really need a light on my MIG torch; I have a lot of trouble seeing what I'm doing sometimes.



Much to my surprise, dropping the body down onto the frame on the horses happened with relative ease and no near catastrophes.




That meant I had time to start some corrective work on the sheet metal. I managet to get the panel to move back close enough to an eighth inch to be good enough and globbed it in place with a couple tacks. Then I ran the cutoff down the seams and started getting the panels level with each other (or more level at least).



So, there's all that. Gotta clean this side up and try to weld it up nicely and take some measurements to see where the body is at now before I do this on the other side. That's a lot of what needs to happen back here other than re-doing the back of the floor area over the rear crossmember because I hate what I did back there now. The cowl needs a little attention too. There's a high spot I want to chase down and some rot under the stanchions to fix. Then it's all floors and doors.

 

Well, since my shielding gas was getting low on me and I misplaced the arbor for my thin cutoff wheels, I decided it was prudent to stop trying to cut and tack on my sheet metal. This led my to tackling a little tool project I've been meaning to get to trying: converting my English Wheel to a Tubing Roller. Though once I laid my rollers out on my little fab table, I realized I could also use the table itself with the lower anvil.



SO, I built that and ran it until I (predictably) broke some garbage flux core welds.


I managed to get about 6" on mark for the first piece (of 6) to make the new nose structure. I expected this to end up scrap so I'm happy so far.



So, yes, the tool broke. It was a test run and I didn't have a few things it would have needed to work as well as it could such as bolts the correct length to hold the V rollers so they don't deflect and shielding gas to weld things up properly. Some kind of retainer hoop for the shaft to control the anvil deflection would help too.



I did have the presence of mind to hedge my bets when I made the main support though. You'll see here this little stub which doesn't really do anything for the rig on the table. That is the correct length to seat on the bottom anvil receiver on the HF English Wheel and has a hole for a set screw (I also used up the last of my gas welding it in so it's the last decent weld on there). I'll likely get a 3/4" bolt to plug the top in this configuration. All I really need to do to make this work is drill some more holes to bolt some arms on for the V rollers and I can use the wheel to bend metal too. We'll see how that works. If it doesn't, I'll put it aside and buy a ring roller from HF to get the job done I guess.

 

That is some good thinking!

 

Been busy working on the back of the tub. Finished cutting and stitching the driver side quarter panel on. This side was much faster and I did it mostly without clamps by working top down and just pushing the panels together lightly with a hammer handle.




After that I moved on to getting ready to work on fixing the floor mess in back. I started by joining the top cross brace to that one I made in the middle so I could get a proper sense of what I'm going to do back that way since it will influence how I close things up.




Then I got me some Ram Board on the advice of @Mikel50 and set to making a template to fill the floor in. I managed to transfer that to steel yesterday before quittin time but I need to get creative to put the brake in along the front since my brake is only 30" wide. I may tip it or try to clamp it to the table and use some plate to leverage it. Not sure I want to drop a grand or so on a new brake just to make one bend.

 

Lots of progress and looking solid!

 

I dont know why this thread keeps getting bumped out of my notifications when theres an update! Looking good and good to see the body back on!
For that short section that you need bent, you can definitely do that by hand with a hammer and some self loathing
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/slow-and-poor-37-buick.1100567/page-7#post-13337385 . I had to do all of the long sections for my trunk weather stripping channel, and used a piece of angle iron clamped to the face of a bench, (to give a flat plane with a sharp corner) and some rectangular tubing clamped down to sandwich in the sheet thats getting bent, and to help, i used a little map gas torch to help with some convincing. Came out as good and was cheap!
Let me know if you ever need a hand! Im no pro but im great as dragging my feet with short spurts of productivity and about 45minutes away!

 

Yeah, I tried a few things that didn't work that I didn't want to share (because they didn't work) that got me to about 30º but not sharp enough so I think my plan is to make an angle iron sandwich on my fab table and hit it with stuff. I'm wishing I had bought a wood******** already; I always meant to get some and always liked them.

Once I get my shots, I'm planning to get a lot more social with working on my cars so yeah man, I'll take you up on that at some point. I'm also thinking of doing a shop night/afternoon someday. Protip for getting up to Woburn from the South Shore: Don't ever believe that 93 through Boston is faster than taking 95 the whole damn way around

EDIT: I found a flat hardwood and leather******** from Dagger Tools on ePay for $40 shipped and bought one since it is something I've been meaning to get for years anyway.

 

Aside from my nicer metal shaping hammers, i have a few brute/ smash hammers that i use for stuff like this so it doesnt matter if the faces get marked up, ( i found the ig story from when i was making the channel pieces and it was a cheap throw away import hammer that i had ground a slight crown into). I also keep a few of the smaller sized orange HF rubber dead blow hammers dedicated just for sheet metal without heavily marking up the metal with hammer strikes. Ive heard good things about Dagger tools so it should work out well.

Its definitely been weird this last yr not randomly ending up in people's garages and shops working on stuff

 

Made workable templates to close up the floor and back of the tub on the car finally. The Ram Board is working great. Made some more flanking braces up top there but not sure yet what I'm going to do down bottom between that and the angle iron I flipped over and trimmed to sit inboard. It catches the sheet bottom nicely there.





I'm not sure what I want to make this back panel out of but I think it will need to be steel. Just not sure if I will use 18 or 20ga. The sides can be whatever, they're just interior panels, but the back will need to support the box over the rear kick and actually needs several mild brakes in it. Which is making me want for a large brake even more. I may have to make one.





I ended up braking the edge I needed with a BFH and taking the sin out of it with my new flat********, which is a little less heavy than I expected but very nicely made. I almost screwed the curve bend on the panel but when I dropped it in the car after trimming the brake it fit fine. I just need to relax it slightly and it will lay flat. I also plan to sharpen the one brake edge on my little 8" Eastwood bead roller when I put some ribs in the panel. It doesn't need much since the bend really stiffens the panel.










Be careful where your sparks go.

 

That is a bunch of progress and looks great. Sparks are not harmless, I hate 'em in my shoes!

 

I've been at it in the shop a bunch but lost a bit of time on the sheet metal brake I tried to build with some steel I wasn't using. Long story short, the base needs to be stronger and sharper and the angle Iron I need is over a dollar an inch right now so that's gonna wait til the mills catch up to demand a bit I think. It can't bend 18ga at any real length; it either lets the piece walk or spits it out.



Pulled my little 8" bead roller out and made a new patch section for the top rail on the driver's side on the body. Ran it through the English wheel (but honestly I would have been better off slip rolling it a little) before I tipped it into the quarter inch profile. Planished the curve out a little and got it good enough for filler. I need to get a spool of 024 in my welder because it just will not cooperate on this thin stuff with the 030 no matter what and blow through fills me with immense rage.







AND I laid the first coat of white Rust Bullet down too. It lays down like Elmer's glue. I didn't enjoy laying it on with a brush but it is pretty forgiving. It doesn't run too-too bad but you do need to be aware of it. I was able to go back around and chase out most of the runs I made. The brush strokes mostly leveled themselves out too. I will be using a 4" roller for the next coat.



Once everything was white, I decided I couldn't live with some of my welds being left unground so I went back at it with a flap disk. It came off without a whole lot of fuss or funny smells (fully cured at this point). I will probably need this area to be relatively flat anyway since I probably need to attach my nerf bar/headlight mount here.



I came up with a bolt on puck type spacer and plate that will make it a little more straightforward to install the roll bar. I will have a bolt/cap welded in the ends that will come through the crossmember from the bottom up into the center of the tubing and a square foot with a couple bolt holes I can fasten to this .188 wall box tube. The bracket on the back there will eventually handle whatever shock mount and rear nerf-bar bracketry I come up with.