Hot Rods The Belly Button Bucket Build Thread

Yes, plenty.
The panhard bar on my roadster is 1" but it's a heavier car and has more tire than yours.
Thru-frame bolts don't need to be bigger than 3/8", I wouldn't use 1/2" I.D. for your weldment stock just because you have it.
Get some dom tube remnant at the steel store if they have it, or solid stock and get somone to put a 3/8" hole in those pieces.
Countersink your bracket and use flat head cap screws, it will look good there on the ouside of the framerail.
Mine has one fixed end with two urethane bushings and a steel sleeve and a rod end for adjustment on the other end, you definitely want some adjustability.

Edit
Marty types faster than me.

 

Same goes for me. I can bend up 1" tube for you if you opt for that.


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I cant sketch worth a hoot. but hope this helps somewhat

 

Well, I need to go back to conduit bending school, but this is gonna work... picture the bar with about half the drop shown and there's where I'm at. Sleepy time!


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I can live with that...


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Even if you end up not needing it, that's still gonna be cool as hell!

 

Well done!


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Well, I went out to Marty Strode's place on Thursday after rounding up some tubing. He showed me all his bitchin' projects and told me badass stories. Then, he took my conduit template, transferred to paper, bent up some 7/8" x 0.156" wall, and nailed the dropped panhard bar bends on the first go. True professional. I can't thank him enough.

By then I had been away from the girlfriend and dog for too long to get away with more time in the garage, so I called it a day. On Friday, my friend Corey came up from Eugene and we hit both the PIR and Expo Center swap meets - got completely soaked multiple times but had a blast and walked away with a few goodies. I also met a H.A.M.B.'r named Mark building a wicked '34 coupe - I gave him some gauges in exchange for my swap meet allowance. By the time we got home my body was saying, "No more for today!"

Saturday morning I headed to the garage. I mocked up the dropped panhard bar and looked everything over. The bar is perfect, but I think I have a different idea to do the frame side bracket.... in case I need to make changes with ride height and therefore change the mounting hole to keep the bar in the center of the ladder bar window. Anyway that's about as far as I got before it was time to take the dog to the dog park and head to work.



Change chassis bracket to this:



I accidentally drew it with the upper mounting hole intersecting with the mounting hole underneath - it won't be like that in reality.


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Well, I had a goal of having the rear suspension pieces dropped off for powdercoat before I hopped on a plane for a week long "vacation", and I didn't quite reach that goal. Close, though.

From this:



To this:



Which fits here:



And for the other side- the drawing from the other day:





Bracket tacked together (I checked to make sure the bolts don't intersect, all good):





Hopefully next weekend things will happen....



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Ok, good news! I got the rear suspension pieces, clutch and brake pedal arms, clutch cross shaft, and the newest project, a bolt on trailer hitch off to powdercoat before work today!

Also, while on vacation, I got to take a few rides in this beauty, which made me want one pretty bad... I didn't fit in it, though, so.... back to T buckets for now.



Panhard bar stuff:







And the trailer hitch project. I plan to tow a small teardrop eventually, so I wanted to incorporate that now. I know the short wheelbase and light weight is working against me, and the trailer design will be heavily influenced on those constraints.

If you'll remember, I was planning to incorporate my shock mount and panhard bar mount with one bracket, back before my panhard bar design became the laughing stock of the internet for a bit. Well, I didn't want to cut all that out after the panhard bar was taken care of, so I mirrored the bracket on the other side to create a cross bar:



I then tied it to the drop bar for the trailer hitch using a pair of SoCal spring hanger gussets I had laying around.



The drop bar mounts under the leaf spring using the perch bolts to sandwich a steel plate Paul bent to shape for me:



In the photo above you can see I fancied up the gussets a bit, and I added some mounting points for safety chains using a couple cut down forged panhard bar mounts I had in the scrap bin. Below is a view of the completed assembly from another angle:



And with the body set back on as a final check:



Keep in mind the trailer will weigh on the heavy side ~800lbs, and I'm gonna shoot for closer to 600, but we'll see. Just for funzies, I ran a deflection calculation to see what I would get with just the drop tube with no gussets and ended up with 0.004", which is next to nothing, and that was assuming 2x trailer weight....I could go into detail of how I arrived at 0.004", but it got confusing each time I tried to type it out, so.... So the gussets are peace of mind I guess. Anyway, I'm excited to see things come back from powdercoat. Then I should be able to go back to page 1 and start completing sections. Thanks again to any and all following along.





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Nice details, your hitch looks good! Are you planning on building your tear drop?

 

You can always tell people that those gussets are ANGEL WINGS just along for the ride.

 

Outstanding Tim, it just keeps getting better with every revision.
Looks like you planned this from the start, really looks great.

 

well done, excellent work its gonna be a cool hot rod

 

That's the plan! I think rather than start building another car right away, that enhancing the use I can get out of this one will be more beneficial. It will be nice to have room for some luggage, the dog, and the gf. I'm not planning to do anything earth shattering with the teardrop trailer build, but I do have some tricks up my sleeve. I'm not sure if it will be ok to post all that on the HAMB, so I will probably do a build thread on the Garage Journal, then link to it from this build thread. I never thought I'd be the type of guy to be excited to go "camping", but after reading b-bop's thread, I quickly realized I was missing out big time. Link:
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum...f-make-the-most-of-it-solo-road-trip.1020556/

 

Teardrops are a fantastic upgrade from tent camping. I recently built one for my brother & his wife. Planning on building a couple more. (I need one, too!)

Nice job on your hitch!

 

I never much cared for camping.........until I got a girlfriend.

 

Well, when I took the parts over to the powdercoater, I realized I had a few small pieces I would like coated also, so I prepped those this weekend. It was also suggested I coat the 3rd member, and my eyes glazed over for a bit thinking of how in the world I would sand all the webs, nooks, and crannies of that thing....but it wasn't too bad. Not nearly as smooth as the rest of the stuff, but given what time and tooling resources I had, I think it came out ok. Time will tell!







Since setting deadlines seems to produce progress, I have set a goal to get the frame over to the weldor before my brother's bachelor party, which is Memorial Day weekend. I think that is manageable as there are only a few small things to address, but we'll see how it goes!


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How do your fingers feel after spiffing up that pumpkin? LOL

 

Like I ran them over a cheese grater for about 12 hours.... in other words they feel terrific.

 

If you remember from a few lifetimes ago, I spent a bunch of time making these brackets to hold up the no longer present Moon tank.



Well, it seemed silly to leave those in the scrap pile, but I had no use for them until recently. One of the final projects I wanted to complete before blowing apart the frame to be welded up was to find a spot for a jack of some sort. I did a lot of digging around, but I couldn't find anything readily available that would be low enough to get under the front axle and tall enough to lift under the rear axle. I decided I would design my own scissor jack to suit my needs, and one weekend my cousin was in town and all our fun had been rained out, so we dove into the project. We made a bunch of links out of paper and started pinning them together until we had something we thought might work..... then I went to the early bird swap meet in Vancouver a month or two later and found a scissor jack that may/may not work for a dollar. Come to find out it does everything I need it to, so that was a great purchase. Now to mount it...





Another small project that needed finished was the driveshaft safety loop. I got that tacked in Saturday.





Just a few small projects left on the frame and off it goes...

 

how come some (pictures) are nuthin' but "x" on my screen ?

 

I get that sometimes, too. I'm not sure, but I think the server may be low on bandwidth and threads with lots of pictures will time out and give you an x instead of loading them all. Hopefully I don't have to go back and fix them all...so far it is hit or miss and not the same ones gone each time.

 

Been happening in a lot of threads and has been reported to the boss.

https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/photos-not-showing-in-threads.1061465/

 

I'll save most of the pictures I took to update the posts on page one later, but I got the chassis stripped down to finish a few small things on the frame. Ran out of welding wire, but I should reach my goal of getting this turd dropped off before my flight Thursday morning.


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Caught a few glimpses awhile ago over on the de-uglifying T thread but just spent some time cruising through this one. I really like what I've seen here. Your "T" has great proportions and tons of really cool details. Thanks for taking the time to document what you're doing.
Very nice work! (And, a lot of it!! )

 

Excellent work, Tim! Your attention to detail is amazing.

 

I like the jack install, but is it intended to be used in that position or do you plan an access hole in the floor so you can get at the mounting bolts? Or is expanded between an upper and lower mount?

 

I like the T bucket!
But I think you may have some structural problems with the trailer hitch. I worked for a Major trailer hitch manufacturer for five years. The biggest problem is the hitch is not actually mounted to the frame. It's only as strong as the spring mount bolts. The bolts are already working in a vertical plane with the spring and now they will be pulled in a horizontal plane by the combined weight of the trailer and the load amplified by inertia at speed.
The receiver tube needs to go all the way through the vertical tube and welded on both sides.
If a right angle gusset connects the two tubes together in the inside angle it will greatly increase the strength.
If the spring mount bolts snap the side gussets may rip or twist the cross pipe.
The possibility also exists that the spring may come out of the rear cross member.

 

There will be a hinged access hole in the passenger floor. I mounted it 3/4" above the frame rail, and the floor is 3/4" oak, so it will be flush with the top of the floor. The idea is to open passenger door, lift up on velcro'd carpet, flip up hinged cover, grab hex key/allen wrench, lower jack. I don't intend on doing this often - just an emergency type deal. Good eye!

Chester, I understand what you're saying, and like I mentioned in the post about the hitch, I put some thought into the loads/forces/moments this will encounter. I do not intend to tow anything heavier than a small teardrop trailer - 4'x8', 800lbs on the heavy side. I don't have time to go into detail right now as I'm about to head into work, but if I get a chance on my break, I'll try to clean up my notes and post here. Thanks for bringing this up.