Alphie Under the Knife

Only a fool would take on this much rust!  BTW, I'm a fool!

Page Ten: Serious Surgery

Rusty Rockers - Somewhere There’s Solid Metal

With Alphie belly-up like a dead fish, I can get to her rusticles easily.  Standing up and working at chest height, it’s heavenly.

First up, Alphie’s ragged rockers.  Clearly, Alphie spent some time on salty roads, that and 60’s auto makers’ rust protection was mostly in name only.  Rootes’ anti-corrosion regime was red oxide primer.  Alphie’s undercoating turned toes up long ago, leaving black mucousy wads here and there on her nethers.  Bonehead Wrenching’s anti-corrosion regime is POR15, great gob that!  I might over-coat it with red oxide primer for authenticity’s sake – we’ll see, that’s a ways down the lane.

At first glance, the rockers are a shambles of jagged rust, but with my new perspective, I’m beginning to see how Sunbeam glued these cars together.  “If you can figure out how it works, you can figure out how to fix it” – at least, that’s what I tell myself.

With new cutting discs in my grinders, I went about prospecting for solid metal.  (I now understand why shops have racks of different sized grinders loaded with all manner of discs – switching disks burns a lot of time.  I have a 4 ½ inch and a 7 inch grinder, which helps, but still…)  I whittled down the passenger side, the rustier of the two, then I started poking about on the frame members where the rockers attach.  More flaky metal!  Fortunately, the rust is localized and not systemic. 

So, here’s the run down for cross member repair:

The Front Cross Member:  The rockers have three attachment points: at a front, middle and rear cross member, for want of a better description.  The front cross member only needed a small patch, about 2X2 inches.  It was easy peasy, and it gave me some good butt welding practice.  I recreated two tabs that serve as the actual welding points for the rocker panel pieces.  I attached the tabs using my latest toy, a 120-volt a spot welder from our grand benefactor, Harbor Freight – more on that below.

Front Cross Member before

Front Cross Member after

The Middle Cross Member:  The more I glared at the middle cross member, the worse it got.  The middle cross member shoots off from the main X frame at the center of the “X” and perpendicular to the centerline of the car, kinda like this: “X—“.  It also has a small box frame support that runs parallel with the centerline that supports the floor pan where the seats are mounted.  It also connects the front and middle cross members and runs all the way to the bumper attachment points at the front of the car. 

I noticed some flakey metal so I mounted a full-scale assault with double-barreled grinders, a reciprocating saw, an air hammer, chisels, hammers and bloody fingers.  After removing a length of malignant metal along the length of the cross member, I could see inside the cross member…  Flakey, crusty and paper thin, so more cutting!

With the two sides of the perpendicular extension of the middle cross member flayed open, I could see that the end of the parallel cross member was not entirely attached to the perpendicular piece anymore, BUT I finally found some solid metal.

  

 Parallel Cross Member:  The parallel cross member needs a new tip and attachment tabs.  The parallel cross member is boxed sheet metal, but I had to saw off a 10.5 cm length of it to find metal solid enough to hold welds. 

Box Frame fabbed and spot welded.  You may note that one of the tabs is in the wrong place - I figured it out when I started to install it!@%#*&

Butt-welded to the existing cross member and partially cleaned up.  I removed the misplaced tab, but now I see I need one on the opposite side of the other tab... insert your favorite curse word

OK, the truth - I kept cutting the cross member at weird angles so that fabbing a new chunk of box frame that mated up to the existing cross member would have been problematic.  It took about three tries to get a reasonably square cut.  Meaning the actual bad metal was only about 5 cm long.  It’s sodding hard to make a square cut with a grinder, just saying.

I fabbed up an 11 cm chunk of box frame using my spanking new spot welder.  The extra 5 mm gave me some leeway to adjust the mating edges to get a good butt weld.  It turned out mint, if I say so myself.  Check out the pic.

Perpendicular Cross Member:  This cross member (the one at the center of the X frame) is an upside-down serif U shaped box with a piece of sheet metal welded to flanges like the serifs on the U.  The bottom sheet metal piece has weight reducing holes in it, which present a fabrication “opportunity”.  I haven’t taken that on yet.

One vertical side of the U will need a patch about a foot long, but it will be an easy fabrication with only a flange on the bottom edge where the sheet metal bottom attaches.  The other vertical side of the U (where the parallel cross member attaches to the perpendicular cross member) will need about a 6-inch patch, also with only a flange along the bottom edge.

Middle Cross Member gutted.  The yellow lines show where patch panels will go

I'll have to recreate this rusty bit.  It covers the bottom of the Middle Cross Member
Remember Alphie is belly up in the picture above 

Rear Cross Member:  I can see some crusty rust, but I haven’t taken a grinder to it yet.  More later.

Spot Welder:  You may have seen Wayne Siebrecht’s You Tube channel – he’s restoring a Tiger with bad rocker panels, not nearly as bad as Alphie’s but that’s neither here nor there.  His video’s are quite helpful.  Anywho, he pointed me toward the HF spot welder.  So I figured, if it’s mutt’s nuts for Wayne, I'd give it a try.

My circuit breaking spot welder

My spot welder is the bees frickin knees!  It made fabbing up the new chunk of box frame much faster and easier than plug-welding it with my MIG.  (Editorial Note:  I have been referring to “plug-welding” as “fill-welding” in previous post.  They seem like synonyms to me, but most people on the interwebs use the term "plug weld", so count me in.)

The spot welder pulls some juice – the instructions tell you this, but it’s a bigger problem than I expected!  You can’t plug it into an extension cord, even a hefty one.  When I was welding up the box frame section, I kept tripping the breaker.  Any resistance will load to circuit.  For example, the welding tips were a little loose creating enough resistance to trip the breaker.  I found that I had to turn everything off on the garage plug circuit (which included the plugs in the kitchen) helped.

 

I found that it would make a couple of welds and the next one would trip the breaker, but there didn’t seem to be a pattern of how many welds it would make on the trot nor how much time I waited between welds.  Apparently, if the garage fridge was running, it tripped the breaker, if it wasn’t, it welded right along with no worries.  Now, I turn off the fridge for spot welding, just don’t forget to turn it back on!

A Quick How-To:  The mating surfaces being spot-welded must be clean, a bit scuffed and in tight contact with each other.  Any rust or space between the surfaces creates resistance that will compromise the weld.  And, uh, the little sparks shoot out of the weld are damned hot and will burn through anything other than leather gloves.  It’ll make ya cuss - wanna see where it burned my little pinky?

A Portable Spot Welder:  The cord on the spot welder is only about two feet long.  Since I can’t drag Alphie within two feet of one of the two outlets in the garage, spot welding on the car itself is a problem.

[Side Rant:  Why do builders only put two outlets in garages, fer sod’s sake?!  When I build my cavernous Garage Mahal, I’ll put an outlet every two bloody feet and at a 220 outlets on each wall!  TVA will write my name on a wall somewhere!]

This adapter lets me use the
higher amp circuit on my generator

Just so happens that I have a gas-powered generator.  After the great power outage of 2011, Dad decided to give his offspring generators, thanks Pops!  I wrestled it out from its corner of the garage, dusted it off, fired it up and plugged in the spot welder.  When I pulled the trigger, the generator did a little torquey dance and died.  I upped the idle and tried it again.  It burned a good spot weld but still did its torquey dance and died.  I found an adapter while digging in my Dad's stuff that will let me use the higher amp circuit - I'll keep you posted.

 Higher amps but still 120 volts

Rocker Restoration continues and I’ll update as I take on new acres of rust.

Closing Health Note:  I have created a nightmare of ragged metal edges that are ravenously hungry.  Wear your damn gloves, and buy more Band-Aids (sorry, adhesive bandages)!