I’ve been busy/lazy… thus the lumped together updates.

4.6.10 – Worked on the seatbelt mounts for the bed mounted seats, and did some welding on the subframe brackets on the new frame.  It was a nice change from the week before, where my welding attempt failed horribly.

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4.13.10 – Dan and I worked for a short time.  Mainly focused on cutting out parts of the last remaining crossmember under the bed for the new frame.

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You’ll notice I skipped a week.  Last week’s Brat Night was spent working on the hood project for Ultimate RX.  I had tried to weld the patch panels to the hood myself, with horrible results.  Since that had been the first time I’d welded in some time, I wanted to prove to myself that I can indeed weld halfway decently.  I think I accomplished that this week, as well as made some good head way on some fabrication stuff.

I started by tackling the seatbelt mounts for the bed jump seats. You can see here that it was in bad shape…

I cut the old metal off, and ground down the spot welds.  I saved the nuts, and reused them with some plates I had laying around.  It felt good to lay some welding beads down on metal that didn’t just disintegrate.

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After I got the plates welded in, I spent some time welding on the subframe mounts on the new frame.

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Some more on the Brat.  Some more measurable progress.

Basic plan tonight was to remove all the remnants of the rusty unibody frame rails that were cut off.  I also had hoped to begin fabbing up the cab wall reinforcement plate and maybe run some small beads around the wheel wells where I cut stuff out.

I managed to get the first part taken care of.  Looks pretty damn good.  I sprayed some of the rustier areas down with Metal Ready, the POR15 metal etcher.  While I waited for it to do its magic, I decided to setup the welder.  I spent some time with a scrap piece of sheet metal practicing my welds.  I have a ways to go before I want to strike an arc on the body.  It also was made apparent that I’m out of gas.

To finish out the night, I wire wheeled the rusty areas I had sprayed with Metal Ready.  In theory, those areas have been mostly rust neutralized now.

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The last few times i’ve been over to work on the Brat I’ve focused on stripping undercoating from under the bed area.  Its this immediate area I will be doing the majority of the fabrication for the new s13 subframe.

Tonight I spent 3 hours or so with a my trusty knotted wire wheel stripping off the remainder of the undercoating that was left from last weeks scraping.  This was far more rewarding that the scraping step, actually ending up with a finished product so to speak.

I was also able to mark out a couple of lines on the crossmember i’m keeping.  The areas with the ‘x’ will be where the new frame rails will intersect it.

Check out tonights pics:

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Tonight was rough.  I rocked it solo, tackling the undercoating again.  I started out the evening by using a chip brush to spread some aircraft stripper on the offending undercoat.  While I waited for that to do its magic, I cut some sweet chunks of metal with my bandsaw.  The triangle pieces will be some bracing for my crossmember brackets.

After that was done, I started scraping.  And scraping.  And scraping.  I’ve found in my trial and error with undercoat removal that stripper->scraping->then knotted wire wheel is the best work flow for removing the undercoat and controlling the mess somewhat.

I didn’t get to the knotted wire wheel yet, that comes next time!

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Dan and I got together this evening after work, and put some time into the Brat.  Tonight we focused on getting the Brat better situated on the rotisserie.  The biggest thing we did was add some holes to the mounts for the front, so we could bring the rotating assembly closer to the body of the Brat.

While it sounds simple, that was a good hour and half of work.  We had to remove the passenger fender, pound some stuff flat, drill some holes, and reassemble it all.  Once we completed that, we moved the rotating points on the brat closer to center to allow it to pivot better.

With some assistance from my brother Robert, we rotated the Brat to a horizontal position and secured it.  Somehow during this process, Dan’s finger got whacked… he left a bit early with a missing/unattached finger nail.

After Dan left, I assessed the situation, and determined what the next step is going to need to be.  There is a ton of undercoat on the bottom, and I’d like to remove a good portion of it under the bed where all the fabrication will be done.  I hit some areas with a clean & strip pad in my grinder.  While it did work, it seemed to be consumed awfully fast, and was semi clogged most of the time.  So… I have to decide if some wire wheeling would work? or if its time to get a sandblaster, or… mystery option i’ve yet to come up with?

Here is the gallery of pics from tonights work, yes its kind of random…

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Brat is on the menu!

Saturday I helped a friend out with some graphics installation.  In trade, he is letting me borrow his virgin rotisserie!  By the end of the day, Jay and I got the Brat all mounted up.

Here are the pics from that:

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Tomorrow, Dan and I have our first work party on with the Brat on the rotisserie.  Progress pics to come!

My boy Dan and I spent some time last night cleaning up the Brat’s garage.  It was much needed!  Took a whole load of stuff out of the garage, mostly recyclables and broken car parts.  It is going to be much nicer to work in there now…  Especially when the rotisserie comes!

Here is a couple pics with my new camera.

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