So maybe the title is pushing it but honestly I thought I was done for surprises.. now I don’t know anymore. But before we get to the new crap that was found we are gonna go chronologically this time.
So last post after lots of trial and error I got the crossmember in… I need to hurry up and get this thing finish so I can stop looking at the fact that the passenger side sits a little higher than the other side on the front… but everything else is correct… nope not even going there… its in should be fine.
There I go drifting, so my two other tasks on the crossmember day was to get my seat belt mount made and welded in and to put the front subframe back on. So here we have a seat belt mount.
I didn’t weld the top side cause as you can see theres kind of a door step in the way… but no worries thats coming off soon… maybe… who knows, either way it will be welded before I am done… hows that for progress…. lol… sigh.
So the next task drove me to drink, maybe I needed one I don’t know but it started a nice downward spiral, believe me if you read the post I posted before you would see I was losing it (no one read it and I have since deleted it… trying to stay fun and positive here).
Bolting the subframe up, so the lower mounts have always needed to be pried at to get the bolts in, this happened before I even messed with the lower mount panel. No big deal, after some prying and tweaking, boom subframe in… but then I was thinking hey I got my nifty new front brace bars now, why not fit those while I’m here… long story short… they don’t fit… in fact the fit was so bad I spent a lot of time tweaking the subframe thinking holy crap I screwed up the subframe mount so bad the car is way out of wack.
So after taking all the subframe mounts loose and fitting just the towers, these should be in the most true position I find the bars still don’t fit… well that is just odd isn’t it. Turns out the adjustable ends don’t seem to have enough adjustment and/or are just slightly off to where they won’t fit… oh and my damper mount on the LH side has the wrong angle… just a little, should matter… but now it does…. joy.
I have decided rather than reaching out to the vendor to tell them hey your really expensive bars don’t fit my not so stock shell anymore that his been patched god knows how many times that I would just fix them myself. No I haven’t been that productive, at some point yes I will have to tackle it. Either way heres some pics of that crap…
Quick glance it looks like things will fit… look closer, the LH mount without the foot is way over the subframe the RH side sits a ways off. I used my grinder tool to add an angle to the mount and it starts looking better. My thoughts I will buy the correct thread stock cut the plates, or make my own, bolt them to the subframe then tack the bars in place. should be a perfect fit then.
Ok and now onto what I have done today that has me second guessing this shell once again. Honestly, for the money I have spent I wish I bought something else, but I am in it now… just gotta keep pushing forward.
So in preparation for the door step/post repairs I needed to remove the front scuttle, I needed to replace this because the RH side was clearly rotten… well the LH side was once too but apparently its been patched and had a boat load of filler on it (maybe the RH side is just so rotten because it wasn’t taken care of as much?).
Surprisingly though the closing panel below it was actually pretty good, it got chopped off anyways cause I need to repair the inner wing higher than I thought… oh and the dash rail…. and the bulkhead… probably should take my bonnet hinges off too just to treat the rust while I’m in there too.
Before I cut the scuttle out I made sure to measure the opening against the top part in two places, this way I shouldn’t have issues with windshield fitment later on. Scuttle removal wasn’t that bad, lining up the new scuttle panel to figure out where to cut the sides of the windshield not so good. I may have already cut too high on one side, Luckily I didn’t cut the piece off so I can weld the disc line. But as I was removing the scuttle I discovered my dash rail wasn’t as good as I thought, in fact its pretty rough. Rough enough where I really need to replace all of the panel that touches the bulk head and scuttle, this sucks cause the bulkhead is actually pretty solid. The plus side to all this, most of these welds are hidden. Except the ones on the dash rail. Honestly I won’t know how this is gonna go until I start and I am not sure when that will be, I might move onto the door step for now and think this over for a bit….. now the photos…
I have been finding getting down in the garage difficult these past couple weeks. I want nothing more than to be done with this and driving again but I feel like every step forward throws me back 5 more. I know theres no big push to finish this super soon but I really don’t want to allow myself to let it sit and go untouched. Depending how all this corona stuff goes I really would like this to be ready for meets next year at the latest… Hell I would love to take it for some fall drives too. I am finding if I work on it here and there it becomes more bearable though.
I think a lot of my exhaustion with this project is I have high expectations about what I can achieve on any given day. Today I said I’m gonna cut the scuttle off, it took longer than I thought, but I did it, had I planned on doing more I probably wouldn’t have got it all done and felt somewhat defeated…. especially cause I would still be fooling with the dash rail stuff. Either way that is all for now, time for a beer… crap I think I’m out though.
The Rust chronicles 