Sunday 24 June 2012

Finishing up the chassis spine and starting the pan halves

Quite a bit done today...

First up was finishing off cleaning and priming the underside of the frame horns and rear torsion bar housing.



Wire brush on aa angle grinder was used as before. For areas that couldn't be done this was I resorted to a small wire brush on an air drill.



Once done the bare metal was treated with Metal Ready.



Then it was given a coat of primer to keep surface rust at bay. I have one job left on the spine which is to weld up a small drilled hole in the underside. I'll tackle this at a later date as I'm in need of a tool to do the job that I don't yet have.



With the spine virtually complete it was time to make a start on fitting the new pan halves. I went for heavy duty panels from Heritage. Here the first panel is roughly aligned to gauge general fit.



This area needed slight adjustment to fit correctly.



As did the corner in this picture where a very small slither of the pan was trimmed off.



Needing to hold the pan half in place for welding and not having any clamps long enough, I bought some of these. They are Cleco panel pins. The idea is you drill both panels to be welded together then use the pin to temporarily hold them. The pliers are used to fit the pins.




ONce I was happy with the general fit of the pan I started drilling holes and fitting the Cleco pins.


Pan half in place and held with a number of pins fitted at six inch intervals.



Next job was to mark the pan half at one inch intervals where it would be punched for plug welding. This spacing matches the spacing of the spot welds originally used by VW.



Pan half removed, holes punched and underside cleaned from paint.



The lip area was then primed with weld through primer.



Next it was fitted back into place wth the Cleco pins, ready for welding.

Sunday 17 June 2012

Welding in the cover tabs

Well, over the week I managed to get a new supply of mig wire, although my gas bottle is now running very low! Despite this I thought I'd try and get the cover tabs welded in place. As I'd already started with the first one I just continued plug welding it.



Then on to all the rest, one by one. They were each carefully positioned and clamped in place before being welded.





The welds were then cleaned up...



...and a coat of primer sprayed on.

`

Sunday 10 June 2012

Small step backwards and a slight hiatus

After cleaning up the inside of the chassis spine I was ready to plug weld the cover tabs in place.

First job was to coat the tabs with weld through primer on the side that faces the chassis spine in order to avoid corrosion at a later date.





Then the first tab was positioned and plug welded in place. Unfortunately this led to a rethink. Where I had pre-drilled the tabs for the Camloc fasteners, this made it very difficult to position the tabs, to the extent that the second tab I tried would have been completely out of alignment. The only thing to do was to start again and leave the drilling of the tabs until they were in position.



Having also seen the tabs in place I decided I didn't like the look of them either so took the opportunity to re-design them. Below, the new tabs are marked out.



Then rougly cut to shape. You can see that this time I opted to make pairs of tabs together. This should resolve any aligning issues.



Here they are trimmed to the final shape. I also chose to round off all the corners.




Masked up ready to prime the inside face.





The rear-most tab clamped in place and plug welding started. Unfortunately at this point I ran out of mig wire so all stop whilst I order up some more! Even at this stage though I much prefer the look of the new tabs so am kind of happy I had the earlier problem.

Tuesday 5 June 2012

De-rusting inside the chassis spine- Finished

Well, it's taken a while and was rather fiddly but I now finished removing the rust from inside the chassis spine. I also took the opportunity to clean up the top of the frame horns, torsion bar tubes and shock mounts.



Best I could do for a picture showing inside the spine!




Once again, covered in a coat or primer to keep surface rust at bay.