Ulu

It hit 56 today and it’s going to be warmer tomorrow. Possibly 67 and even 69 Saturday. Then 100% rain Sunday, so time is on my side. Today I got some more cleanup done on the pan and the fuel tank support and I put down about 30 more small welds. Then I rolled the chassis back over so I can finish welding the seat rails down to the pan. But I still have a couple little gussets I have never installed, and I need to get those in too.

I took another good look at the chassis today, and it wants more pan welds. Some of the spot welds are just bogus, and there aren’t enough for good edge restraint. So painting looks more remote at this point. The fog is just burning off.

A very early Good Morning from The Gateway to the Sierra. I spent several cold hours out in the boatyard, cleaning up my VW chassis, rolling it back over to hit the ugly spots with a grinder. Scraping, wire brushing sanding and feathering paint is nearly done on the bottom side. I want to put some more spot welds on the pan. About 50 more. I am praying the weather will get dry enough to paint before it all gets rusty again. I still have a bit of minor welding on the topside first. I’m not used to wearing gloves just for sanding, but I am much more sensitive to cold weather now, than when I lived on the muskeg, in Baudette, at the Northwest Quadrangle. That’s farther north than 3/4 of all Canadian people live. I didn’t realize at the time why the only TV shows we ever got were some variety show from Winnipeg, with stomping Tom Connor, and then Hockey Night in Canada. I prefer the local warm weather, hitting 54F yesterday. Here’s hoping for continued warm weather. The paint I bought wants 55 min. I will heat the paint and the metal before I try to spray, but first it gets etched.

I saw that too. It was a really sad story.

Mine too. BTW, I watched the full video of pulling that pole trailer apart, and it was a real rusty PITA. Sometimes a free trailer is not so free.

We just inflated a whole industry of people who move legal paper and digital numbers around, at a big net loss.

Maybe this technique will work? 😉 https://youtube.com/shorts/hG08xhuiS8A?si=9MEaBFb4YICBgIKA

Who remembers when Frank Zappa played the bicycle? Ulu plays the Volkswagen pan: https://youtube.com/shorts/DV5exhhWIsM?feature=shared

Rain rain rain! It rained four times in the past day and this has kept me out of the boat yard and in the house messing with my aquariums. It also got much warmer, up into the 60s, but now it’s cooled down into the 50s again. But today appears that it’s dried up enough that I will be able to get out and continue knocking the rust and bad paint off of my chassis.

By the way, when I finished welding, the oil-canning stopped. The distortion wasn’t removed. It increased enough to stop popping under light pressure. It will still pop up if you smack it with a mallet. Perhaps the sheet metal will flex just enough to not crack at the welds from entrained stresses.

I got the last 24 crossmember to floor pan welds on the bottom, fixed a couple bad welds, and started stripping off the bad paint. It sounds solid with no rattles.

I got most of the floor welding done now. I also got the fuel tank support welded on. I need to roll the chassis to finish up a few more pan welds. Also I still have a few welds to repair.

I was calling these gussets because they also connect to the crossmember, but they are really splice plates, where the bottom cord of the frame has been severed and then welded. Anyhow I made two more today and got them welded in. The welding went pretty well considering but I was careful to purge my hoses so that I didn’t have any water. When it is cold I can see moisture condense on the outside of my flow meter after a few minutes of welding.

There’s a trick of perspective that makes it all look so “square”. (It’s right behind the trunk in my photo.)

I got these little gussets welded on today. I think that tank of “bad gas” was actually wet gas. The new gas worked crappy, then ok, then crappy, then ok. I laid our all the gas hose to slope downhill, then purged the hose 15 seconds. Problem solved I would have done more, but today was Christmas tree shopping day. I got a lovely tree but the trunk was 1” too thin to bolt into my stand. I ended up making 5 little “shoes” for the clamping bolts from scrap tubing. Problem solved.

Now that they are made by an Indian company, things might improve. They managed to hit the moon, and it’s not a real big target.

Today I got my new gas tank support stripped, sanded, and ready to weld in place. Then I made a couple 1/8” frame gussets that notch in under the new crossmember, right where the frame kinks in on each side. I prepped the floor and crossmembers for more sheet metal welding. I’ll get all that stuff welded in place tomorrow.

This will support the fuel tank cradle. I need to strip it and weld it in. Also the ends of the new underseat crossmember aren’t welded yet. This really stiffens up the floor. I may have to “adjust” the seat risers if the seats won’t drop right on the risers.

Those “new” Jaguars are nothing more than sketchy computer-made styling studies. Not even close to the equipment requirements of a real car. Even an EV car. The interior study is laughable. Like a hair salon designer did it. This is all a big headfake.

Being car-poor due to high cost of operation and ownership is a common problem. I have a touch, but I never let myself quite slip over into crazytown on things like high hp fuel, blowermotors and rumpy camshafts. But there is this one turbomotor I’ve been hoarding for decades…. It’s not a HO engine though. It’s a torque engine, turbo-normalized for mountain driving. If I can ever finish my current job, it will turbo once more!

We may, as a species, have time for all we can wish. And we may not, so in the end we must be careful what we wish for. If you reach too far and miss, it’s like you never went, but paid anyhow. Like some of my sporting adventures. 😉

Well today was a challenge. I tried to weld that crossmember in, and started masking a real mess. When TIG welding steel you see the blue-white plasma flame of the electric arc, and you see the glowing puddle of hot liquid metal. When you TIG weld over dirty or painted steel you will also see miniature fireworks. Tiny little orange sparks fly from the puddle. This is carbon atoms as they burn up and die. But my metal was clean. Burnished and acid dipped, then sanded. I had a new electrode. What the devil? You will also see those sparks when you are welding and run out of argon. But I had a fresh bottle. I had just turned it on. I checked the flow, and gas was flowing normally. I even added more gas. The sparks actually increased a bit. My weld looked like porous crap. I did a test weld on different steel. Same issue… Finally, you will see those little sparks when someone has put MIG welding gas in an argon bottle: 75% argon and 25% CO2. The carbon sparks come from the CO2. So after I figured this out, I had to take the gas back to the welding shop and exchange it. This whole exercise blew most of my energy today and I didn’t get as much done as I expected. I did however get 24 little welds tying that crossmember to the floor pan, and the whole car just got much quieter and stiffer.

I got all the rust and dirt out of that tube and coped it a bit more. Then I drilled the holes and the access holes. It needs a bit more trimming but it is almost ready to weld.

I weld outdoors. I want extra argon because of air motion. Also I do lots of tiny welds, so that takes extra too. A larger bottle will cost the same, as I pay for cuft used. Not the bottle itself. l bought lifetime 126 cuft bottle exchange rights for $300. If I want a bigger bottle it would be like $500**, but nothing bigger than a 156 sits on my cart. So it’s not worth the cost to enlarge **unless I found a used tank cheaper. That rarely happens with argon, but is how I got my oxy/acetylene tanks.

I got the seat risers installed and the seats fitted. Then the seats came back off during welding & paint. The back of the seats bolt through the steel crossmember, but the fronts just bolt to the pan. This was flimsy & always needed its own crossmember. This new crossmember tube is only 16ga so just enough to stiffen the floor. Tomorrow I will get this tube and the risers welded down.