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| I was ready to put Alphie on the rotisserie until I saw this. |
Page Eight: Finally Fabricating!
I decided to spit Alphie like a roasting pig on my Homemade-Harbor-Freight-Engine-Stand-Rotisserie. I modified the engine stands and got the rotisserie ready to mount an Alpine (that blog post is coming, soon). But, when I looked into where to affix rotisserie to car, I found the front bumper mounts at the tips of the frame rails were No Bueno! Rusty with stripped threads and someone had welded nuts to the ends to mount the front bumper, like I said, No Bueno! FABRICATION BABY! I’ve been waiting for this!
Shiny New Frame Rail Tips
My new fabrication bench, complete
with sheet metal brake, lots-o-new metal fab trinkets and such kit, gets its
first test!
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| I need to make one of these. (From the Organ Donor) |
Step One: Trot out to the
Organ Donor and rip off the
passenger-side frame rail tip - by hand, no tools needed! Yep, it is that rusty. The avulsed (vocab word of the day) rail tip
gives me something to measure without climbing under Alphie hundreds of
times. It also shows me how the Rootes
folks put it together.
I’m admitting here, without shame
or apology, that I’m completely metric when I’m fabricating. I can tell you exactly what half of 950mm is. Don’t forget, I am an English teacher by
trade. I have no idea what half of 1
7/8” is. No hate!
Step Two: Destroy several file
folders! I saw this trick somewhere;
make templates from file folders. File
folders are cheap, and I have tons of them laying around.
Generically, the steps are 1) measure
the dingus (many times), 2) transfer the measurements to a file folder, 3) cut
the file folder to the shape, 4) trace the file folder template onto sheet
metal, 5) cut the sheet metal to shape, 6) bend it, 7) weld it and 8) BAM! A new
dingus! (There are many other fiddly
tasks, along with some screwing up, but those are the basic steps.)
The frame is made of boxed sheet
metal (14 or 16 gauge depending), so I made two file folder templates: one for
the inner frame and one for the outer frame.
Check out the pics of the file folder templates and the cut sheet metal
cut from the template. The templates
work for the left and right sides; all I had to do was make the bends in opposite
directions.
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| File Folder Template transferred to sheet metal. The red lines have scribe marks showing bend locations |
Sub-Problem One - Jack points:
Alpines use, as I see it, the sketchiest method of jacking the car on
the side of a motorway. I’m sure it
works fine as long as you’re on a perfectly flat, level and dry concrete
surface, but nowhere else. The Rootes-provided
“jack” uses an upward-angled, square stock gizmo that fits into an equally
upward-angled square hole located just under the bumper attachment point. A chap is to slide the jack’s angled proboscis
into the square hole and, using the lug wrench, crank the nut on top of the
jack to raise the tire off the (we’ll say) earth. (Check out the pic of the “jack’s” base – a measly
2” diameter disc guaranteed to sink into anything less that Sahara-dry soil. Best case: only have tire troubles in dry car
parks (parking lots, to us yanks.)
My generous description for this whole
setup is “teetery”. I suspect that, back in the day, smart Alpine
owners bought a scissor jack on the way home from the dealership and chucked it
in the boot. Oh, and never, no matter
the emergency, put any part of anyone’s body under an Alpine when it is
precariously propped on its factory jack!
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| The Rootes Jack - Just don't use it! |
But, in the spirit of
authenticity, I must recreate the jacking point on my new frame rail tips. To wit, I picked up some 1” ID square stock,
which fits perfectly over the Rootes disability-waiting-to-happen jack’s prong. I decided that the square stock needed some
reinforcement so I welded a strip of 1” flat steel stock to the top of it. You can’t see the reinforcement in the
finished rail tip. At any rate, I plan
to keep a scissor jack in the boot. The
Rootes jack is only for show and/or demonstration purposes.
Sub-Problem Two – Substantial attachment points: The Rootes folk used a ½” fine thread (of
course!) captured nut for the bumper bolt.
I feared that I would need something more substantial for the rotisserie
attachment point. I discovered that
“coupling nuts” exist and are used to connect pieces of all-thread
together. Of course, no big box store
has ½” coupling nuts, so to the internet!
Bolt Depot gets a shout out here –
I love ‘em; they have everything. I
ordered four ½” fine thread (they had fine thread, a strike for authenticity) coupling
nuts along with a length of ½” fine thread all-thread that I’ll use to attach a
2X6 to the bumper attachments and then the engine stand plate to the 2X6.
Step Three: Cut out the sheet
metal! I did all the tweaking on the
file folder templates. (It took a couple
tries.) Next, I made the bends in the
templates and matched them to the frame tip I yanked from the Organ Donor. I only had to cut the sheet metal once! Each piece bent up exactly like the
template! No wasted sheet metal! (OK, a small confession: the first inner frame rail piece I bent in
the wrong direction. I was making the
right tip, and I bent the piece in direction needed for the left side. No worries, I saved it to for the left tip!)
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| The front piece before I welded the coupling nut |
Step Four: Welding! First, I welded the coupling nut to the front piece. The front piece is a rectangular piece of sheet metal that I cut and bent to fit over the opening of the boxed frame rail (see the pics). Once the front piece was formed and fitted to the frame opening, I drilled a ½” hole in the center of the front piece. I grabbed a ½” bumper bolt, a washer and a nut, and secured the coupling nut to the inner part of the front piece. Then welded the coupling nut to the front piece.
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| All the pieces ready for welding - also the original and the left side rail tip welded up. |
I drilled holes in the side of the
sheet metal where the piece of square stock rests and fill-welded each
hole. Fill-welds simulate spot welds, are
just as effective and a great way to glue together sheet metal where it
overlaps.
When the 16-gauge sheet metal is
bent to shape and welded, it’s quite robust.
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| Yours truly burning some wire! |
Step Five – Grinding and priming:
I’m using flux core wire in my MIG welder so the welds aren’t exactly
stacked-nickels clean. The flux core
wire leaves copious spatter and ragged surfaces. (I’m learning to weld during this project, so
it’s not all the machine’s fault.)
I have a myriad of grinding
apparatus, both electric and pneumatic, and trusty hand files too. With some self-etching primer, the pieces are
ready to weld on to Alphie.
Step Six – Getting the tips even!
Step six requires many trips under and out from under Alphie to measure,
measure, measure! I’m looking for a fixed
point on each frame rail where I can consistently measure to the rail tip for a
definitive length.
Once I build up the courage to cut
the frame rails, I’ll measure from my fixed points to get a consistent distance
to the tip of each rail. I’ll spot weld
each tip to its rail and measure a few hundred times more before I stitch the
welds together and grind it all smooth.
I plan to fill-weld some scab plates inside the box frame at the
junction where each tip meets its frame rail.
All part of my build-to-110% plan.
I will take it as a win if the frame tips don’t bend while I’m rotating
Alphie around on her rotisserie.
If they do bend, I’ll throw a proper
wobbly! (Gratuitous Britishism for this
post! I’m rather chuffed I found a way
to use it:)
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| Welded and ground down. All it needs now is primer, paint and to be installed in Alphie. |
Next Up: Roasting an Alpine!
At about 2AM one morning, a couple
of things occurred to me:
2) The interior width of the frame
rail is 1 inch – you know, because the jack point is 1X1…
A good plan until it met the
enemy. Welding the 1X1 square stock to
my nifty new frame tip was easy, but fitting the other end to Alphie’s boxed frame
required suffering. To get a good weld
to the frame rail, I could see I would have to remove a 6" X 3" piece of sheet
metal that makes the outer skin of the frame box. Sounds easy enough, right? - like when the
instructions say, Step 2: Remove drivetrain.
Captain's Log, Supplemental – Fitting the Shiny New Frame Tips
The frame tips are fabbed up, and
they are a cracking bit of kit, in my (somewhat) humble opinion. The problem is gluing them to the end of the
frame rails. Simply butt-welding sheet
metal to sheet metal will not be strong enough.
The tips will bend/break when they hold Alphie’s weight on the
rotisserie, not to mention if she takes a future shot to the bumper, perish the
thought!
Like I mentioned in the previous
post, my first thought was to scab in some sheet metal rectangles and fill weld
them to the inside of the frame and to my spanking new tips, a fairly solid
plan but…
A Flash of Duh!
1) I used 1X1 square stock tube
steel to recreate the teetery Rootes jack points, which means…
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| The tip with the 1X1 fill-welded into place |
3) I can extend a piece of 1X1
square stock into the frame rail box to give the tips the strength they need,
Duh!
Such twilight epiphanies create
groggy mornings, my mind races, and being a little too pleased with myself, I
struggle against the urge to make a lot of early morning noise in the garage. BUT I have a banging better plan!
Cutting the frame tips off was
more involved than I expected. Contorting
the grinder inside the fender and lower valance was problematic. I had to drill out spot welds and drop the
lower valance to get access. I probably
would have had to remove the valance to get her on the rotisserie anyway.
Cutting off the old tips cleanly
and squarely didn’t happen. The first cut was a
bit ragged; it looked like I chewed it off, but nothing that lavish welding and grinding
can’t fix. I also razed a rodent subdivision
that had gone up during Alphie’s dormant years, ewww!
I cut a piece of square stock that
runs about three inches into the tip and about five inches into the frame rail. This piece will run along the top of the
frame rail and be fill-welded to the top and both sides of the frame rail box.
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| Homemade panel separator and requisite hammer |
It took a grinder, sawzall, spot
weld drill, air hammer, my handy homemade panel separating knife (see the pic),
an hour and a half and a spot of blood to wrest it from Alphie’s grip. Also, I had to keep the piece intact enough
to measure a pattern for its replacement.
The rust inside the frame would have compromised the welds anyway, so
all necessary work.
Like a good little fabricator, I
vice-gripped the frame tip/1X1 assembly into place and measured, and
scrutinized, and palpated, and pondered, and squinted, and measured… The tip stuck out farther than the passenger
side. I cut 2.5 cm from the frame rail,
getting a much cleaner cut with the entire valance gone, by the way. Re-vice-gripped the frame tip to the frame
and repeated the measuring/squinting cycle.
Eventually, everything was GO.
Time to burn some wire!
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| The tip welded inside the frame rail. The square stock provides extra strength |
I welded everything and ground
down some solid if ugly welds. The
new frame tip is strong enough to rotisserize Alphie, but I decided to hold off
fabricating the replacement frame rail’s outer skin until I can rotate Alphie
so that I can weld without crawling under the fender well.
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| The yellow shows where I will fab a cover piece that will become the outer skin of the frame rail |
Can confirm that welding upside
down SUCKS – note to self: get a welding blanket, those little sparks burn when
they fall in one's lap and jump around the floor under one's bum.
Now for the passenger side!
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| Partially welded in. I'll need to fill in the gaps and holes |
