Ulu

This is just a symptom of us all having too many toys. . . Err. . . Tools.

You should watch the video with those Pakistani guys rebuilding batteries. Everybody’s wearing sandals of course and I was just waiting for someone to pour hot lead on their toe.

I have lots of fab to do before any serious welding gets done. I bought an electronic level to help with setup, but it actually is an electronic protractor with bubble levels attached. Useful, but not what I wanted. Right now I have a 2’ carpenters level, cheapie magnetic angle gage, and a magnetic torpedo. Price and availability of steel has been very bad and so I have been scrounging for tubing and angles to do the set up. I managed to find some free stuff for jigging etc. I was going to actually build an elevated steel table to do the body frame. Instead I think I’m just going to level up a set of parallel steel rails on the floor using epoxy putty and shims and then I will knock it off the concrete floor with a big scraper when I’m done.

I started setting the fenderless body up on steel rails, so I could square it up and build the subframing. Things will need some tweaking to get square enough to measure. The subframes will mount to the frame with rubber. They will be a bit small, and I will do the final adjustments by adding fiberglass inside the body. The bumper is a structural crossmember, so I have it set up loosely for now. I will need to mod the rails for some clearance & build the rear rubber body mounts to fit. When I got this car there were Six small bolts holding the front of the rear tub to the Volkswagen pan, but no body bolts to hold the rear of the tub to the frame. The original assembler just kind of ignored the assembly instructions at that point. If that were the only problem . . . ?

Wiley coyote had that same problem…

Too bad we couldn't dig a tunnel with a drone army. We could sure use the water. There was once a plan to use dams and canals to bring Alaskan water to the desert, and generate hydropower along the way. Civil engineers had a 50 year plan, 70 years ago, but we never had a 50 year plan to pay for it. Engineers really don't do finance.

One of these days I’m gonna have to learn a new song, but once again I have spent all my tig welder money on something else. First my granddaughter had $$$ problems with her car, and then I spent a bunch of money on truck parts, and finally I went to the DMV and paid all my fees and penalties for the plastic car. Anyhow, it looks like the stock market is still doing OK, & as long as it continues, then eventually I will have the money.

I quit buying gas at the marinas 30 years ago because I decided I liked my boat to run. There is something else used for O-rings on refrigeration equipment, and they are green. I don’t know what they are made of, but one guy on the Internet swears that he won’t use any other type of O-ring because they’re only slightly more expensive, and they resist everything.

You can buy LL100 at most airports. Almost all piston engine aircraft use this. This is Low Lead 100 octane. It‘s illegal to put it in your car here, because lead kills the catalytic converters. Racing gas could have lots of methanol, which is hell on buna o-rings. I think everyone uses viton o-rings now, because they don’t swell in methanol.

I got out the monstrous 9” Milwaukee disc sander and a big wire cup and started burnishing the damaged areas on these frame rails. This baby will rip you up with just one little mistake. Each of these rails had a crack in the same place, and probably a result of me doing wheelies on my dad‘s tractor. If you burnish the metal you can find the cracks and open them up for welding. One of the rails cracked through to a square hole, and on the other one I drilled a hole to end the crack so I wouldn’t have to weld from here to China. I only burnished the areas I need to weld and check, and I will send these rails out for sandblasting after I weld them up.

I bobbed off the rear pans and did a bunch of cleanup on the used steel today. Here I use a cutoff bit to mark the opposite edge. I recovered some heavy steel panels from a WW2 Navy desk. This will help me form a solid floor. Good news: no rust found inside the multi-layer pan construction at the rear.

Thank you, but I would still be cutting it up. The stock pan is sort of useless because it sticks out under the fenders collecting water & dirt. I will be tossing all the nasty bits soon anyhow.

I learned to weld with a stick first, then with acetylene torch, and then with the TIG and finally with the MIG. I found it after welding with an acetylene torch that it was very easy to pick up a TIG torch. But I’m not good at it because I haven’t had any practice with TIG in 45 years. But that is going to change very soon if the state of California doesn’t rip me off to bad over taxes. I still haven’t paid the taxes on this car and I need to go in September for sure or the penalties will be enormous. I have been looking at a multifunction welder online, & it has some terrific reviews. Almost 900 of them. But it’s only $795. This is OK for my purposes & it’s not industrial quality, but I think they quoted 60% duty cycle At 180 A, running on 220 VAC. That’s pretty impressive. The main housing appears to be plastic and it does not have a water cooled TIG torch, although it does come with the foot start pedal. I’m not sure if it is a switch or a rheostat type. For that price I’m not expecting a miracle. The only TIG welder that I am really familiar with is a high dollar Hobart from the 70s, but it had everything. AC/DC & full pulse modulation, frequency control, voltage, plus start voltage, start delay timing, and things I don’t remember. I never had to touch the electrode down: just get it close in, step on the pedal and go. Also I did not have the task of setting that welder up, and it was dedicated to welding 0.060” wall stainless piping. I had never welded much stainless and it made me look like a real pro right off the bat. The set up was perfect. It will take a little practice to achieve that with my new welder.

If you have been welding for 30 years and you have never used a TIG welder you are going to kick yourself in the butt for waiting so long.

OK, I am back on the case & I collected some new used steel today for my frame. Here I am leveling, stringing & establishing a Centerline, before I start cutting anything more. There’s about a quarter inch of twist in this chassis taken across 4 feet of width. That’s probably not bad for a roadster Anyhow the frame is also a 1/4” short on the driver side. There’s lots of weld draw on the tunnel. It will need relief cuts during the setup process.

Too much life is getting in the way of my fun! I have not been able to work on the cars as much as I would like. Time to break out the demolition tools and run amok, eh? Anyhow I finally bobbed off the floor pan, and chiseled off some more rusty metal so I could see what was underneath, and as expected, it was more rusty metal. I stuck a chisel through a hole in the frame which was concealed by the mount where the brake cylinder was. ALSO It amazes me how a guy would lay down a half inch fillet weld on 16, 18 & 20 gauge sheet metal. ?

Wife: You could buy me that car! Me: You shoulda married Bill Gates when you had the chance.

This is not mounted in the original vehicle, and when I first saw I said to myself, “this looks like it might be from a snowmobile.” Maybe one of you guys have seen this thing before somewhere?

It was a ‘66 Custom 500 coupe. Sky blue with 100,000 miles of Minnesota rust. $125 OTD. I rebuilt the whole car when I was 16, and my dad paid for all the parts. It’s all been told on this forum before actually, but there are no pictures in existence to my knowledge. The one single part that I know remains in my custody is the sticker from the spark-O-matic floor shifter. Before I could afford a Hurst, it got smashed up by a busy mother with a big ‘64 Buick, a baby & no car seat. The court took pity on her because she was so stupid and her baby had dashed off the instrument panel. They only awarded me half damages. Eventually I got $500 out of my insurance company too. I was heartbroken and I sold that car is soon as I was able to get another one.

She’s really clean. One of my favorite Fords. My first Ford looked just like that under the hood, except it was a ‘66 500 and the engine was Ford blue…. LOL And it was rusty and had 100,000 miles on it. I put a new 289 bronco engine in it (thanks Dad) and painted it black under the hood. But when I got to the trunk, all I had was dibs and dabs of odd paint, so I mixed them all together and painted the inside of the trunk this funny mahogany brown color. But when it dried, it came out this horrible peach! ? That Ford was my first car, so I could go on for days talking about things I did to that old Ford. But not on P15….

Until I talked to the fire captain about electric cars, I was about to look for a hybrid modern car to power my fiberglass kit car. When he told me how much water it takes to cool down a burning Tesla, he said it doesn’t actually put out the lithium fire. It keeps burning till it’s nearly all consumed & all you can do is cool the surroundings as much as possible as it will ignite other plastic cars & even the asphalt road on fire. One way this happens is if you drive over something that rips a gash in the floor of the car. At that point it will puncture some batteries and start a chain reaction were they catch each other on fire. When that happens people generally stop, or they eventually smell the plastic fire and they get out of the car alive. The other way it happens is that a Tesla gets pinned between two heavier vehicles that cause it to buckle in the middle. This again breaks the battery pack open and starts a fire, but this time the doors could be jammed from the collision and you will have to break the glass and crawl out if you are still able. Now to me, the gullwing Tesla looks like the doors will fly open if it buckled in the middle. but I’ve never seen a crash test of any of these cars. I think that if you have an electric car like a Tesla, you are essentially sitting everybody on top of a big battery pack and hoping it never roasts them. Under-floor fire suppression should be mandatory along with onboard oxygen if necessary to survive the halon, foam, or whatever it takes to put out lithium. Except, I think the problem is you simply cannot put out lithium. I think it’s like magnesium or phosphorus & once it starts to burn the only way to stop it is to get it so incredibly cold it stops by itself. I think we’re talking liquid nitrogen cold. Somebody told me that salt water will stop the reaction and I don’t know if that is true. But fire suppression might be as simple as putting all the batteries inside a plastic box of salt water. Anyone who has lived long by the seaside can tell you of horrid electrical corrosion problems, & will right away laugh at that idea! These cars use a system of coolant pipes and a radiator to remove excess heat from the batteries when they are being used heavily. If that fails your floor is going to get hot quick in the car will shut down. In theory. A Chinese company has come out with a different type of lithium battery pack that uses a different type of construction. It makes the battery easier to peel apart and disassemble and recycle, reduces heat concentrations, and it turns the entire battery pack into a big air cooled radiator. Also it makes the battery pack a system of structural I-beams that connect the frame of the floor together from side to side 100 times. This is a big deal. If you don’t have a liquid cooling system, the car is a lot lighter.

Putting out an electric car fire is not a trivial thing. My neighbor was a fire captain, and he told me that it could take 3000 gallons of water to cool off a burning Tesla.

3D printing of iron. I keep praying.

Oh man I forgot all about that ball and socket shifter in the dash.

As I recall, you have to push the seat all the way forward on the track, and when you do that, the seat back knob will allow you to lay the seat all the way down. I think it goes in two directions at that point. This was 50 years ago, and someone else’s car, so my memory may be faulty.