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Posts posted by Hurmeez
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Shortly after completing the above, I got sent to the states for a couple of weeks for work which killed all progress for obvious reasons. Still, I got to see a space shuttle and shit, so that was still pretty sweet.
Once I got back, it was a matter of ticking off house jobs for a few weekends and various other stuff, all of which meant it was a month or two between finishing the thermostat housing and getting stuck back into the car.For reasons I've grown to despise, you'll recall I cut the rear quarter panel off the car over three years ago now. Given it is still not welded back on, this is still the main focus of the work.
So far the list of jobs I wanted to do while the quarter was off has included:
- Wheel tub outer repair DONE
- Rear jacking point rebuild DONE
- Inner sill brace section DONE
- Inner sill/Floor outer repair DONE
- Seat mount re-engineering DONE
- Outer sill replacement DONEThat leaves a very short list to complete before the quarter is ready to go back on. Namely:
- Pinch weld seam repairs IN PROGRESS
- Repair Cert IN PROGRESS
- Properly paint inaccessible areas NOT YET STARTEDThat is unless I embrace a bit more scope creep...
As one does, I was excitedly showing off my progress to my partner one day (who is lovely but doesn't pay too much attention to how I burn away my spare hours) when she noticed that there are no rear seat belts. "Of course my love, it's a 50 year old car" was my almost truthful reply. It was at this point that I was informed in no uncertain terms that under no circumstances would my small daughter be riding in a death trap like that. Which sucks, cause I have many fond memories of drives with my dad in old death traps, and I'd hate for my kids to miss out on the same.
So we came to a deal. I'd put lap belts in the back. Diagonals were technically an option back in the day, but at the cost of a big ugly vertical bar the mounted the top hanger in the middle of the rear windows.
While looking at how I could do that nicely, it occurred to me just how little effort had been put into any kind of side impact protection back in the day. It makes sense of course. There's a reason these old cars are so light compared to new ones. But it still isn't great. Given my track record with RWD cars (stacking only the second one I've ever owned on the first day of ownership at 18), and the likelihood of catching a rouge mum in a Q8 blowing through a roundabout in Dorkland, I figured it would be prudent to at least have a go at improving it a little bit.To begin with, I wanted to improve the door structure. Any improvements in the door itself would be largely pointless if the impact was able to tear it off the latch, so that was the first point of modification. When we wrecked the Capella for its V6 waaaay back in the day, we saved as much of the interior mechanicals as was practical. Because of that, I have a perfectly good burst-proof latch assembly that just needed to be grafted in.
Initially, I just roughly mocked it up to give me a good idea of where the male part would need to mount.Once I had a good idea of where things would need to end up, it was simple enough to make a quick cardboard template to mock up the latch mounting arrangement.
Note how it all tucks nicely behind the window track. Like it was meant to be there.
Transferred it to steel, and added a 3mm doubler behind it to give the whole area a lot more strength.While I was in this corner I also took two seconds to fill in a speaker hole that I'm not planning to use.
Before I got too far ahead of myself, I took the time to sort out the linkages to make sure I could use all the standard Escort parts still. I had to make my own key by taking the barrel out and reverse engineering it from each wafer, but it worked out fine in the end.
Oh and splash out on a 3D printer. Been looking for an excuse to get one for a while anyway.
Once I knew that would work, I got stuck into the brace itself.
Each end is gusseted with 2mm sheet braces. The hinge/front end of the door already has a big 2mm spreader plate from factory, which the brace is welded directly onto, and the rear end is welded to the 3mm doubler I installed before. I opted to go for 25x50x3mm box, just cause I felt like moving the bare door around the garage was too easy and I could do with the extra weight training. Because I'm also a weak scrawny little runt though, I did cut a bit of gravity out of the inside face before installing it.
The window and latch mechanisms all clear, and it looks pretty good on the car.
So that's the door pretty much sorted. Next is to beef up the B pillar. It's all well and good having a strong door, but if the B pillar just folds in and drops the fence post in your lap anyway, it's all kind of moot.
For this, I used a similar design. 3mm doubler welded to the wheel tub, 2mm gussets to the main member, a 25x50x3mm box section, and another 3mm doubler behind the door catch to transfer the load from it into the vehicle structure.And that's it. I've taken to thinking of these braces as "open casket bars". God knows they're probably not going to save anyone's life, but at least they might help give my ugly mug an open casket funeral. I'm also mentally justifying the extra weight and time spent with saying they'll stiffen the chassis up a bit. Probably just going to make the car slower in the end, but ah well, I'm a great believer in the sunk cost philosophy anyway.
I've again got more stuff photographed and ready for writing about, but Imgur's hellishly poor usability totally killed my motivation to make updates recently. I've switched image hosts now, so I'll have a crack at writing a bit more in the near future to bring it all a bit more up to date.
Cheers
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I might be being a bit thick but I can't see any adjustment built into the throttle pulleys? How are you planning to balance the banks to each other?
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Are you planning on setting up any kind of protection/shielding for the shifter linkage assembly? Looks great at the moment but I imagine road grime and general detritus may not treat it too kindly?
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I suppose I better start with the obligatory acknowledgement of the extended time between posting...
Cool so with that out of the way, I started to make my first little bits of progress at the new house. And in the theme of progress, I figured the best place to start would be going backwards and redoing work I've already done.
It started (as many bad ideas do) with me standing and staring at the car for a while. The more I looked at the radiator mounts and installation, the less I liked it.
The top hose port of the radiator is above the fill point, and the big notch cut out of the lower cross member is just silly. The proximity to the engine also doesn't leave a lot of space for fans etc, and overall, the rad is just excessively big.
So, what to do about it? Firstly, I decided to look into the engine to rad proximity issue. I went back to the very basics. If the gap is too small, why is the engine so far forward in the first place? Is the distributor too close to the firewall?
Well, no. I'd assumed from the beginning that I'd remove the dizzy and either run batch fire or pick up a cam signal from the front of the engine with some other aftermarket solution.
Ok, what about that IACV? Isn't that in the way? Yeah, it kinda is. Right, so why is it there? Do I need it? For these BMW throttles, yeah, if I want the ECU to be able to control the idle RPM.
Ok, do I need these BMW throttles? Yes. ITBs for me are a hard requirement for this car.
Sure, but do I need *these* BMW throttles? Well, no, not necessarily. @Roman and followers might see where this is going.
Ok, so if I take the intake manifold and throttles off for now, then what is holding the engine forward?
That would be the thermostat housing. Being as it is a FWD engine butchered into a RWD layout, the thermostat housing is now about as far from the radiator as it is possible to get. This is inconvenient from two perspectives; it means the coolant has to return from the radiator past a set of hot headers, and it also means the engine is held forward artificially in the engine bay.
Right, so does the thermostat housing have to be there? Well, again, not necessarily. It's only at the back of the engine thanks to a long transfer tube that takes the coolant from the thermostat to the pump inlet through the valley. If I can figure out a way to get rid of that tube, I should be able to shift the thermostat housing to the front like a civilised engine.
So I had a look at what that might take. The factory pump inlet is fed by the cast adapter on the right hand side of the above photo. I found that by removing the transfer tube, that adapter could be spun 180° to face forward and still bolt up just fine. Great, good start. The next big problem is the cam belt. (If you'll allow me to borrow someone else's photo for a minute) You can see how the belt path runs more or less directly through where the new coolant housing is.
To get around that, I bought a cast aluminium elbow to get the tightest bend I could, then sliced the female O ring sealing surface off the pump inlet adapter and welded on the new elbow.
To finish it off, I needed to make something to allow the thermostat to sit up inside the new elbow and do its job. Initially, I cut the flange off the factory thermostat housing, and tried welding it directly onto the cast elbow.
This was a disaster. A combination of my severe lack of aluminium welding experience (this is my first time using the AC mode on the welder in anger), and a potentially dodgy casting made for very fizzy welds that mostly resulted in a goopy mess rather than a nice sealing flange.
So I cut that off and tried again. This time, I turned up a new flange and tube stub out of a big chunk of scrap from work. The combination of nice fresh material, and my slowly improving abilities made for a much better welding experience this time.Even with the elbow though, it still wasn't enough to clear the belt. To make the clearance required, a section of 3mm sheet was cut and bent and grafted in to create a small notch.
Note I've given quite a generous clearance gap here. I've seen how much these cam belts can flap under high load/RPM, and the last thing I want is to strip the teeth off the belt, or crack the housing or what have you from the two of them coming together. I was careful to ensure the cross section of the narrowest point was greater than or equal to the next smallest restriction upstream to try and reduce the chance of cavitation or overheating due to restricted coolant flow, but I suppose I won't know how successful I've been until I can actually get it running.
Finally, I needed to provide a return for the heater core coolant supply. I cut supply female O ring boss off one of my spare coolant housings and welded it onto the back side of the pump inlet adapter.
This will allow me to use the heater core supply tube from my spare engine as a return tube for this one.
So then we have the final result:
A slightly modified factory return tube can be used for the bottom radiator hose, and the top hose can connect directly to the standard top housing.
I took the finished product into work and hydrostatically leak tested it to ~5bar (5x higher than the maximum allowable coolant system leak test pressure in the factory service manual), as well as leak tested it underwater with helium to make sure there were no pinhole leaks. All seemed pretty good to me.
So then a bit of a debrief: The modifications should allow me to move the engine back about 60mm before more extensive firewall modifications are required. This will have numerous advantages.
- More clearance for a radiator and fans
- A rearwards moved shifter position (I was never totally happy with the stretch to reach 1st as it is)
- Better sump capacity thanks to more clearance between the cross member and the rear bowl
- Better intake manifold clearance thanks to the slope in the factory bonnet.The updated coolant path will also clean up the engine bay somewhat, allowing better clearance for the headers on the passenger side.
As far as what I might have lost from changing to this setup, the factory thermostat is an automatic bypass style which blocks off the heater core and recirculates the coolant around the block until the thermostat opens. My new housing does not do this. To make up for it, I intend to use a bypass style heater tap from a early 2000s Commodore to control the flow through the core, and thereby control the heat itself. This will mean I can turn the heater full cold during startup to manually cut the heater core out of the coolant path and hurry the warming up along, or if I'm really desperate, leave it in the loop and warm myself up at the same rate as the engine.There's still one or two little things left to fully finish off the changes. I'm still of two minds whether I keep the existing fill port and use it as a bleed point, or cut it off and plate over it. I'll see how it goes. The bottom hose tube that comes off the thermostat housing also still needs modifying to mount it to the engine properly, as well as the two feed and return lines to the heater core. These should be simple enough to do once I have a radiator to aim at etc.
If it doesn't work (leaks, overheats, cracks off and explodes etc) I still have a hail Mary solution of removing the water pump and going to an electric pump that is PWM controlled by the ECU, removing the thermostat entirely. That will take a lot more fabrication work and money spent on parts though, so I'll keep that in my back pocket for now until I actually need it.
Thanks for reading. I have done more work on the car since the above, though I've been very slack about taking photos of the progress, so I'll see if I can scrape together enough for a coherent sequel soon.
Cheers.
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Made a little group project trophy/keepsake for a co-worker who was moving on. Each little figurine represents a project he had an especially large part in the success of.
*I did the figurines. The "rustic" plaques were supplied to me at the absolute last minute.
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For what it's worth my money is the oil pump getting into some weird harmonics and shattering into a million bits. Bet it sounds excellent on the way up to it though.
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Possibly a silly question, but aren't a lot of roll cages/space-frame chassis welded chromoly tubes? Or is welded tubing fundamentally different enough from a monolithic material like a flywheel for the process to not really transfer over?
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Good shout. I am intending to back up the flange where I can regardless, just very paranoid about blowing through. My mig is a very cheap Bunnings jobbie and I'm pretty shit at MIG regardless all things considered.
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Yep pretty wild. It went from me taking the piss out of my mates with puddle pictures to us leaving with babber on our backs in waist deep water in the space of an hour and a half. I think once the drain on the road blocked up it was all over. The house was below road level and we ended up with a torrent spilling over the footpath and down the driveway.
I've struggled with motivation and time after the wee one turned up tbh. Trying to light a fire under my own ass with a wedding date in just over a years time, so we'll see. It is fun to be posting again though.
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Thanks mate. It could have been a lot worse. We were only renting so we had the relative luxury of being able to just bug out and not have to worry about it long term too much. Our landlords were really good about it too and there was no stress between us as we all delt with the clean up afterwards. We are also very lucky to have generous family support so we were safe and dry as soon as we got out the night of. There were people who lost a hell of a lot more than we did so we can't complain at all.
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The next detail to think about is the mounting flanges of the quarter. Even though I used an 8mm spot weld drill and was pretty careful about the removal process, it's hard to get away from the fact that an 8mm hole is a pretty big one to fill with a plug weld when it comes to reinstalling it again. To get around that, I've opted to replace any part of the flange that I've had to drill out.
I started with the easier shorter sections.
Then I went on to tackle the longer section along the back of the door.
I made this section by folding one long straight length of steel, then tweaking it and manually stretching and shrinking it in the vice as required to match all the contours of the existing flange.
Ended up with a pretty neat fit.
But then it was time to go inside to make some tea.
And then it started raining
Some of my mates from work were posting in our group chat that their streams were rising and they were getting worried. In solidarity of course, I sent them a photo of alarmingly sized puddles on our back pavers at that time.
But then it kept raining.
And raining.
And blow me down it just didn't stop.
I jacked the car up as much as I could, lifted everything worth saving onto the work bench, and we retreated back to the house (which is raised ~1m above ground level) to wait out the standoff.
We blinked before the water did.
Once it got to mid-shin in the kitchen, we decided it might be prudent to find somewhere dryer to sleep for the night.
The next morning, we returned to the quote Scene of the Crime unquote.
The water got up to the bottom of the bench top. My nice new birthday-present-to-myself welder missed the water by this much.
Note the tide line on the tail gate.
My daily was totaled, and my partner's Corolla missed out on a similar fate by only a couple of inches and the fortunate placement of Toyota's ECUs on the top of the passenger strut tower. Subaru's incidentally instead put them under the passenger front footwell.
So yeah, remember how I mentioned the KBS on all the internal cavities and how two coats was probably overkill for interior panels. Yeah, well, glad I did it now.
The immediate triage for the Escort was to pull the seats out and leave them in the sun to dry out as much as possible. I also drilled some drain holes in the lowest points of the floor boards, and mopped up the standing water as much as possible. Everything got doused in CRC 556 (probably not the best idea in hindsight when it comes to painting it, but such is life) and I borrowed some big 5ft floor fans from work to try and get the garage dried out as much as possible.
Longer term, we had to move out. The house was toast and almost all our stuff was wrecked. We've managed to find a new place, with a slightly better laid out garage and enough room for our little girl to run around.
The car has mostly been on hold since the flood. I've been focusing on all the work around the new house to make it comfortable and setting up the garage to try and make the best of the limited space I have.I think I've got it into a pretty usable state now though. I have the means and motivation so now there's no excuses.
We're back to real time now though, so updates will likely return to the more sporadic rate you'll be more accustomed to. Thanks for reading my ramblings to bring it back up to date in the mean time.
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Lol nah course not.
I don't think I explicitly said so back when I did it, but the deal breaker back in the day that convinced me to cut the quarter panel off was the state of the outer sill. I was considering originally just doing my best to panel beat the quarter on the car, but when I started poking around the sill, I found the typical (for this car) 10mm of bog covering a totally munted panel work. As part of cutting off the quarter, I separated the sill off into a discreet section, which I then also cut off and chucked in the bin. So now the job is getting a good replacement panel in its place.
For this, I shelled out for a new replacement panel from Palmside. Pretty cheap and not too far off the correct shape considering the price.
Figuring it would be too unwieldy to manage the full sill and quarter panel as one unit, I cut the front section of the sill off in a nice straight cut that would be easy to weld back up later on.
That done, I started offering the sill up to the quarter and trimming both to fit.
Once I tacked the front of the sill back on and offered it back up to the car, I realised the alignment wasn't quite right and the panel gap between the bottom of the door and the sill was expanding the further forward it went. Being the anal retentive prick I am, I wasn't able to just let that go.
I zipped through the tack welds and make up a couple of brackets (jigs? Work holding thingies?) with holes of various distances from a central point. This let me swing them fore and aft and finely adjust the relative position of the front and back of the sill to zero in on the gap I wanted.
Once I had my alignment, I was able to tack it all up again, double triple check it all, then start welding it up.
I had aimed to run it all in one continuous bead to minimise the differential distortion. Ended up having one stop/start in the middle, but the HAZ stayed relatively uniform and I did manage to keep the warping to a minimum.
That done, I spent a day or so hammering it up and filing it back as best I could until I got it well within a coat or two of high build primer.
I was right initially, it does make it pretty awkward to handle the whole panel now, but it's not an absolute deal breaker.
Still some small tweaks to do on the quarter yet, but it's coming along.
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To meet the two part seat improvement brief, I opted to focus on the comfort half first.
The main issue with the current layout was the totally level seat base. I'm not sure why I decided on this back in the day when I first did the mounts, perhaps it was because that was how the seat sat on the ground when I was trying it out. Perhaps it was because it allowed the rails to work relatively easily. Perhaps it was because I was like 15 and didn't know any better. Either way, the end product was a seat that put a load of pressure straight onto the bones of one's arse, and left one's thighs flapping in the breeze. So, the most important aspect to improve the comfort would be to tilt the seat base down at the back (or up at the front if you want to look at it that way).
I decided to base the angle of the seat base off my flat mate's Mk6 Golf R, which are pretty aggressive at about 30 degrees (above the horizon assuming his car itself has little to no rake), but really comfortable. As per usual, I started with cardboard.Which made a design that would work, sure, but fuck it's ugly. So I revised the design to a more conventional crossmember/seat box with individual upstands for each seat mount point.
Note also the diagonal braces that pick up on the sill jacking point and gearbox mount to make a single unbroken structure (including the gearbox crossmember) across the whole car.
Happy enough with the shape, it didn't take long to get it formed in steel.
The upstands ended up a bit wider than I really would have liked, but they had to be in order to meet the area requirements for certifying the mounts.
Before welding everything in, I went back and reworked a dodgy high school era patch that I am by no means proud of, and converted the floor replacement panel lap joint to a proper butt.
I intend to coat all the inaccessible cavities of these new sections with KBS as well, but there is no point in putting in all the associated effort to later burn the paint off with welds after the fact. So I put in a lot thought as to the order of operations.
First was to stitch weld the chassis rail to the floor at all the points that will be covered by the seat box.
The plan is to fully stitch weld the chassis eventually, but this is enough to save the paint for now. Yes I know, stop tacking it and just weld it you poof. I'm not very good at MIG alright and this was overhead and Mercury was in retrograde and shush, it'll hold just fine.
Similarly, the car will eventually need a drive shaft safety hoop. The ideal location will overlap this new seat mount somewhat, so I made sure to install a doubler plate now while it is easy to get to.
Big thick SOB but I'd rather overkill it than have to go back in later to replace it in order to meet the regs.
Next was to assemble the seat box and brace assembly as far as practical, again in order to minimise paint burn off later on.
Finally paint! Did the full prep and two coats. Again, probably overkill for an interior panel, but might as well (more foreshadowing).
While this was drying, I also knocked together the two rear mounts for the seat and got their undersides coated up as well (this is a lie. I was doing all the metalwork in parallel and it took ages to get all the nice little sill hugging details on all the plug weld flanges right).
Finally, with all the component parts finished, painted, and ready to go, I chucked a coat of paint onto the appropriate areas of the floor pan, waited the requisite hours for it to dry, then measured measured measured and welded the buggers in for good.
(Note that the rear inner mount was not welded in. This will be remade in 1.6mm steel after the verdict from the certifier recommended as much if I want to use the built in seat belt anchor on the seat. Which I do. The factory Escort ones are at a weird angle and not very comfortable to use.)
And would you believe it, I have no photos of the seat in place once all the mounts were fully welded in.
You'll just have to take my word for it that it looks just like it did in the cardboard mockup shots. Heaps comfy now too.
It does have the feature (bug? Not sure, hard to say) that it raises up now as it moves forward on the elevated seat rails. This might be useful for any short arse that needs their seat moved forward to see over the dash anyway, since there is no discrete height adjustment in these seats. Regardless, it's at a perfectly comfy height for me when I sit in it, and beyond that who else really matters?
Next mish will be to weld on the sill brace panel I fabbed up in the last post.
Before that, the brace and sill both got generous coats of KBS, weld through primer in the appropriate spots, and "Hurmeez woz here" tags before getting closed up for good.Then I welded the panel on, had a baby, moved house, setup a new smaller garage, ground the welds back, and took some lovely photos.
Phew. It must be time to weld the quarter panel back on now right? ...Right?
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These posts are getting fewer and farther between as the years go on. Every time we get stuck into a project at work I'm piling on the overtime, promising myself that as soon as it's done I'll take a week of leave and get some hours in, only for us to go barreling off head first into the next thing with fewer guys, tighter time lines, and ever more ridiculous demands. Add to that a brand new babber in the mix, and the time that I've had spare to spend on this thing has been getting less and less every year. Hell, even this post has been sitting in my notes for months as I slowly find the time to write it. (I wrote the above passage in September 2022 and every part of it remains true ten months later. I'll add wee notes in the post in brackets as I re-edit it now.)
But you're not here to listen to me moan about the shit that we all have to deal with, you want to see what I have actually managed to do, so I'll get stuck in. Bear in mind, all the work in this post was done mid to late last year (2021).
The whole reason I pulled the quarter off was to give myself the best possible chance at fixing all the crap underneath, so I had a crack at that next.
I started by unpicking all the spot welds on pretty much all the component panels until I got right back to the floor pan itself, then started working my way back out from that blank canvass.
First thing to be rebuilt was the jacking point and support brace. I acid dipped the factory doubler plate overnight in phosphoric and reused it, otherwise everything is brand new.
Everything inaccessible is covered in two coats of KBS Rustblast so I have no concerns about any of the rust coming back (Foreshadowing lol. Stay tuned on this)
Next was to move out to the inner sill brace panel.
This was probably salvageable but it made more sense to just replace it for the four or five folds that it would take. I elected to make it out of two parts butt welded together, cause I didn't have any raw stock big enough to do it in one go. The more complex shape on the one end would also be much easier to re-produce as its own part and weld it on again afterwards.
Note that the butt weld was made on a diagonal to maximise the strength of the joint and was in no way intended to be a straight weld until I made the first fold on the long panel in the wrong direction.
Buuut then of course before I welded that on, I wanted to take care of the lap joined replacement floor pan that has been in there for years. I was never stoked with how I had welded that in, and I decided if I was going to do the rest of it right, I want to do this right as well.
So out comes the grinder and out comes the inner sill.
Then zip zap zoop, in goes a new one.
I formed the new panel over the edge of the bench with a length of angle iron clamped on top and patient tapping with a hammer dolly as required. It has ended up with a fairly distinctive hand made finish, but that's kind of endearing in my eyes so I don't mind.
You may notice too, that as part of the sill removal the seat mounting cross member was also removed. This was originally intended as a temporary measure to make it easier to do the sill welding, but while it was out, I thought it might be good to improve the seat mounts.
Thinking about it with the benefit of hindsight, mounting the seat bases dead flat and with M8 bolts, while legal, is neither the safest nor most comfortable way to do it.So the brief for the new seat mounts: Make it more comfortable, and make it safer.
Perhaps here is a good spot to end the post to keep it digestible. Now that Reddit is unusable I have no excuses not to keep the thread updated. More to come.
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It's been a long while since the last post and I don't feel like I've done enough for a full post yet, but I do want to put something up to show what I've been working on and to say that neither me nor the project is dead yet. I had typed out a nice post but then the browser crashed and I lost all of it so this might be a bit less polished than usual as I try to rush it out.
I carried on from the driver's side guard lip by doing the same to the passenger's side. It didn't take long to get the lip cut out and the new one tacked in. You've seen this all before so I shan't write too much about it.
No sooner had I tacked it in, that half the bloody car fell off in my lap!
I let myself be convinced by those less directly invested that this would be the best way to tackle the whole thing. To be clear, I agree with them, but damn is it not confronting to see it on the floor like that. This way I can get good access to properly panel beat all the welds, as well and ensure all the inaccessible cavities are properly sealed up and corrosion protected before I put it all back together. For example, see here the bare metal and (house) paint flaking off the inside of the lower window panel. I can paint this up properly and have total piece of mind when I weld the quarter panel back on.
You can see also how much better access I have to cleaning up the weld on the wheel tub as well.
With the quarter off, I had a nice easy down hand weld to get the arch final welded, then I stripped the panel inside and out.
I then spend the next 50 hours panel beating the lower rear corner to clean up the patch welds and sharpen up the body lines that run back from the rear of the wheel arch. It's sitting with a guide coat at the moment so it looks far more wavy than it is.
The welds themselves are pretty hard to spot at this stage if you didn't know they're there.
I'm not very good at it but I'm enjoying the process. I still have the whole of wheel arch weld itself to handle as well, hence not feeling like enough progress to warrant a full post.
Hopefully by the next post I'll have it welded back on the car and looking straight as an arrow. Here's wishing everyone a happy new year since it will likely be after that at this stage.
Cheers.
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Thanks man. I think I'm slowly getting better at it with each panel that goes on.
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To explain the previous change in direction a bit, I'm trying to do everything the right way, taking my time and getting rid of any and all rust in a way that's going to mean it's not coming back. Previously I could be found guilty of rushing things a bit under the naïve notion that I could have it on the road ready for the end of high school. Well this is the start of my fourth year graduated now so that's obviously out the window. So for a while now I've been putting far more effort into doing everything the "right" way, rather than the quick way.
With that in mind, the next logical step is to sort out the rear guards. That's going to involve a fair bit of panel beating to make any butt welding come out well so any extra access I can get to the rear quarter skin the better. Which means it makes more sense to sort it out first before any of those flash new panels I made go in.
So of course I elected to ignore all that and cut out and replace the inner wheel tub instead.
I did both sides, hence the last photo showing the wrong side. I wanted to kill two birds with one stone here. First, I had a good chance to acid etch any rust starting in between the skins and prime it all so it wont start again. It also let me rebuild the seat mount lug with an M8 captive nut. I don't know what the standard thread was but I've lost the special shoulder bolt for it. I figured M8 would be a sturdy enough size (bigger than the captive nut that was there) and it'll be easy enough to make myself nice new shoulder bolts to fit. You might also notice I stich welded the wheel tubs to the rear floor section as well. Should help to add a bit of strength. Who knows.
Finally I got around to the wheel arch. Someone had previously "rolled" the guards by cutting slots with a big fat slitting disk and hammering them up. Obviously, this didn't lend itself to corrosive longevity. I started by chopping out the shitty rusted lower edge of the tub and replacing it with new steel.
It took a good bit of fiddling around but I got there in the end. Didn't take any photos of the process. Dumb. Still, I'll probably not take any when I do the other side either so that should even it out.
All the bare steel was painted with two coats of Hammerite. Possibly not the best option but it's what I have and it's mostly to keep everything good until a proper final paint.
Next was to offer up the repair panel. It almost feels like cheating to use an off the shelf panel but sometimes common sense does prevail.
I made up a few of these snazzy clamps to hold it all together while I tacked it. They turned out really well. They're really common but if you're not familiar, it's just a piece of square tubing with a slot, and piece of threaded rod tacked to a 1mm steel tab. The tab pokes through the gap and has a hole drilled in the other side to receive a short piece of 2mm filler rod. The nut pulls everything up flush and bingo bango, tacks ahoy.
All tacked.
And all welded. This was a mission and a half. Something like four hours of welding and hammering and probably close to five meters of TIG rod.
I did get a bit of shrinkage warping, unfortunately especially the section that's over the vertical brace member that ties the outer edge of the guard to the rear quarter structure. This makes it next to impossible to panel beat it effectively with the tools I have, though I think I ended up getting the whole thing good enough to skim with a thin layer of filler and call it good. That or I might win the lottery later on and get someone who knows more than me to give the whole car a once over. Dreams are free.
The matt primer really hides a multitude of sins but it actually is pretty damn good. Still could do with a tickle here and there but I'm still happy with what I have achieved.
I got the lip folded up and stitch welded too.
Check out the leg! Pure horsepower there!
I'll properly seam seal them and fill it all with cavity wax come final paint and assembly.
With those folded up, I mocked up a wheel to see how it could sit. I refuse to say fitment. Or flush. Yuck.
Much less yuck. Sweet even.
Even slapped a few extra lowering blocks in there to get the ride height correct.
Could come down another 30mm or so I reckon.
Final note/detail that doesn't really fit anywhere in the story. I changed how the wheel tub transitions to the outer skin. The factory setup makes a nice little shelf front and back to collect dirt and grime and shit and keep a good supply of moisture next to the panel and make a nice little rusty ecosystem. I changed it to be a free drop straight from the wheel tub to the ground and not provide anywhere for anything to collect.
It's not quite as clean on the outside but a little wipe of filler and it'll be fine. You'll never be able to see it from any normal viewing angle anyway.
The panel beating still isn't perfect. Ideally I need a set of spoons and a slapper to get it all where it needs to be. That'll be my next birthday present to me I reckon.
Next job though will be to do it all again on the other side. I know how to do it now so hopefully it'll be a little quicker. We'll see.
Again, thanks for reading. I really appreciate it.
- 27
Roman's 4GR V6 Carina discussion thread
in Project Discussion
Posted
It may depend on the specific alloy used. I can't say for sure what we use at work but we do heaps of welding of printed parts with no trouble. The main thing I'd say is it seems to be less ductile and more prone to stress riser cracking than billet parts. If you account for that in your design though you can avoid it pretty easily. For an exhaust collector (at the risk of stating the obvious) you'd want to avoid a sharp point in the octopuses gooch where all the tubes come together. Either weld in a brace or put a substantial fillet radius in there. We make lots of something akin to a collector and ours has a brace welded in ~100mm from the gooch.
I'd also make the actual weld locations oversized in the printed blank and machine them to final size/squareness with your dad's cnc if you can. Makes for a much nicer weld.