View Single Post
  #11  
Old September 21st 2011, 21:54
owdlvr's Avatar
owdlvr owdlvr is offline
Administrator
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Canada - West Coast
Posts: 851
I acquired this donor front end...


Well, turns out the donor frame head had one little problem, at some point one of the bolts must of snapped, and the fix was to simply weld the sway bar mount to the frame head.


My original plan was to do a big section of the frame head, leaving me lots of mounting bolts and measuring points to work from. I assumed that I could just separate the halves at the spot welds, and weld in a nut from the back for the mount...but once I ground off the sway bar mount I discovered it was already hacked up pretty badly. Onto plan B! Well, truthfully I didn't really have a plan for how to get around it, and probably started cutting with the angle grinder far earlier then I should have. But sometimes you get lucky, or I'm just improving. It took me one big cut and two fine adjustments to get it to where I was happy.





It's not perfect, but only because I had to leave a little bit of the crunched sheet metal on my pan in order to keep the mounting nut. As far as the front suspension should be concerned though, it's all lined up. Unfortunately, that's where the good news ends. Normally I use POR15 for projects like this, but a number of factors had me switch to Zero Rust for this pan. Brush marks with POR15 disappear and it dries with a hard glossy shine. Zero rust, it would seem, dries in a semi gloss, and with the worst brush marks I've ever seen. I only did the top of the frame head and rear suspension mounts, but I'm gutted. All that work for it to look like this:



Really, once the car is together no one is going to see this stuff...but it's going to be a long while before that happens. With the hours I have in so far, it sucks to have it finish like this.

…a few hours pass…

So…Up at 8am, off to the parts store, and I'm happy before noon. Getting some pinholes with the POR15, which tells me the garage is too cold. But I've cranked the heat and it should smooth out enough to make me satisfied. Let that be a lesson...stick with what you know!



-Dave
__________________
'71 Type 1 - Rally Project
'58 Type 1 - I bought an early!?!
'73 Type 1 - Proper Germanlook project
'68 Type 1 - Interm German 'look' project
'75 Type 1 - Family Heirloom
'93 Chevy 3500 pickup - Cummins Swap
Reply With Quote