The Grind

Page Thirteen – The Grind

First there’s welding, then there’s grinding, and usually more welding, followed by more grinding...

An Ode to Rotten Rockers 

In my last posted (April 1), I lamented the search for solid metal; the lament continues.

Burn-Through

I’m using 16-gauge sheet metal straight from Lowes, but Rootes used something slightly thinner.  My little metal gauge gauge proclaims the Rootes stuff to be 16-gauge, but my eyes and fingers tell me it’s thinner.  Perhaps Alphie’s original tissue has degraded slightly over time, maybe the Brits measure metal gauge differently (I have learned that measuring metal gauge is particularly occult, requiring voodoo), but the MIG welder burns through the Rootes metal with aplomb, like COVID quarantiners burn through toilet paper and hand sanitizer. 

Welding my Lowes sheet metal to Rootes metal often means making ugly metal warts big enough to fill the burn-through, which in turn means copious grinding!  (There is the possibility, although remote as a Siberian village, that I'm not that good with the MIG...  Surely not!)

The point, whenever I think I have found solid metal to which I can suture new tissue, I find more flimsy, diseased metal.

Fitting Sheet Metal Pieces

I’m getting the hang of making metal jigsaw puzzle pieces.  I’ve shown how I make a file folder template, which I transfer to sheet metal, but that’s not the end of it.  The "Fitting" can be tedious.

The Fitting involves hundreds of trips from Alphie to the bandsaw, to Alphie, to the vice for grinder work, back to Alphie for gazing and scratching, back to the vice for hand filing, back to Alphie…  You get the picture. 

Eventually, the piece fits and is welded to Alphie.  Then there’s the Grinding of the Welds, followed by the Welding of the Grinds, followed by the Grinding of the Re-welds…  It’s the “fun” I signed up for – truth be told, I love it, but no one ever said I was all that "right."

Latest Harbor Freight tool grab

All of this is very time consuming, and as per my addiction, I turn to my patron saint in harried times.  The good folk at Harbor Freight call me if I don’t show every other week or so.  

Check out my new belt sander!  It cuts the time to “adjust” a piece to fit the puzzle significantly.  (Part of the car hobby, like most of men’s hobbies, is buying more stuff to support the addiction.  What fun would car resurrection be if we couldn’t buy more tools?  And parts?  And other cars? And die casts, but I digress...)

ROCKER PANEL(S)!

Color-coded no less!  Remember Alphie
Is upside down on the rotisserie

I say rocker panels – plural – because each rocker panel is a three-piece assembly.  I made you a drawing:

At the time of this post, I have the “panel,” as I call it, in place.   The “panel” is a flat piece of sheet metal that creates the panel from the lower door sill (rocker) to the junction of the floorboard of Alphie’s interior.  

How the "Panel" and the Stepped Inner-Rocker go together 
with some cool 3D text!

The stepped panel, the piece scavenged from Bob’s Butt (in the pic) creates the inner rocker panel.  The inner rocker meets the “panel’ just below the pinch weld at the very bottom of the rocker assembly.  The chunk of inner rocker from Bob’s Butt gives me the dimensions and placement to fabricate the rest of the inner rocker.

Chunk of Bob's Butt that gives reference
for inner-rocker placement and fender lip support

The outer rocker panel, the one visible on the exterior, covers both the “panel” and the inner rocker and is pinch welded to the edge of the inner rocker – see the pics.  I haven’t purchased the outer rockers yet, because I want to fit the snoz from the Organ Donor first.

After I weld in the chunk of Bob’s Butt, I will bend, fit and weld in the remainder of the inner rocker.

Before POR 15

POR 15

I’m not big on pushing products, but the shiny black paint you see is POR 15 – that’s Paint Over Rust 15.  Anyone who has ever worked on or talked to anyone who has ever owned or worked on a Sunbeam Alpine or Tiger will tell you that the rockers were rusty as they rolled off the assembly line, it’s factory rust! 

After POR 15

Alphie shall rust no more!  I have treated the factory rust with POR 15’s Metal Prep, essentially a rust converter that gives the POR 15 paint something to grab.  POR 15 paint chemically combines with the rust and seals it against moisture.

Alphie’s new rockers will be slathered in a thick comfy coat, inside and out.  A hundred years from now, Alphie may have rusted to dust in a field somewhere, but her rockers will still be there like T-Rex fossils waiting on future archaeologists!

I’ll add more pictures to this post as I complete the inner rocker.

More Pictures!

Here's a pic of the next sections of the inner rocker.  Why make sections, you ask?  Because my little metal brake can handle one foot sections, but a two foot section is beyond its and my capacity.  I mean, I can FIT the two foot section in the brake, but bending it requires a Marvel Avenger - yeah, I tried anyway! 

First I fit each piece to the contours of the inner rocker upper section (remember, Alphie's upside down in the pic).  Next, I'll try TIG welding two sections on the bench and fit them.  If that works well, I'll TIG the entire piece on the bench then fit it to Alphie.

Ready for my new TIG welder!

BTW, the TIG welder is up and running!  I'm learning the ways of the TIG.

Before!

After!  The Inner Rocker Panel, Sunbeam Secret Rust Vault! 

One last pic showing the finished inner rocker. 
The front is boxed in and the support at the door is welded in.

What Not to Do!

Page Twelve – The Un-Doing and the Re-Doing

The tedious tale of a teleworking weekend.  (Alphie is getting plenty of attention during these COVID-19 times.)

The Situation

To fix the rocker panels, I must fix the x-member and its assorted components.  I have fixed the passenger side forward x-member, and the middle extension, but the aft x-member has more problems than the other two.  The leaf attachment is anchored to the aft x-member and a smart restorer would take pains to keep the alignment of the passenger side’s leaf spring shackle to the driver’s side shackle.

Next time I pry a Sunbeam Alpine from its crypt, I’ll be sure to do that!

I could have easily locked the alignment by welding in a temporary brace before I happily hacked away at the rusty supports.  But no, my smug little self lit up the grinders with blissful abandon.

Aft X-Member Tip
Fabbed before the Re-Do

The weekend before the Un-Doing, I had made two of the shackle supports (there are three) and welded them in place.  Feeling quite pleased with myself, I glanced at the driver’s side leaf spring shackle, and something didn’t look right.  Things had gone cock-up! (And you thought this post wouldn’t have any British slang.)  

I scurried over to measure the driver’s side.  You won’t be surprised to learn that things were, indeed, cocked-up, all cattywampus for those raised in ‘round here.

The passenger side shackle was lower than the driver’s side, and the bolt was not at a right angle to the center line of the car.  Furthermore, the opening where the leaf spring bushing sits on the fubar-ed bolt had spread too wide…  All my “Oh shit” bells rang like Quasimodo was in the belfry!

Bracket - Post-hack

So many mistakes, such happy cluelessness – it’s sad really.

Desperate measuring, despondent head scratching, and prodigious “oath-making” commenced.  There are damned few common reference points between the driver and passenger’s side – I mean reference points that aren’t tattered rusticles.  Now that I had hacked everything up, how the hell was I going to get solid measurements?!

Then I remembered…

Bob’s Butt

Bob's Butt - My Savior!

My Sunbeam buddy, Bob (only first names here on the blog) gave me a complete Sunbeam Tiger rear section, lovingly referred to as Bob’s Butt (apologies Bob).  I say complete; the guys rebuilding Bob’s car carved many chunks from it, but I got the leftovers, see the pic  The Organ Donor is far too derelict to give any good numbers, but Bob’s Butt saved mine!

Speaking plainly to myself, I said, “Dumbass, why don’t you measure the passenger side of Bob’s Butt?  Der!”

But Bob’s Butt is worth far beyond good measurements – solid, (mostly) rust-free pieces.  All I had to do was cut them off (after measuring EVERYTHING!) and paste them on.  Well, it’s not as easy as that, keep reading. 

Add a 1966 Sunbeam Tiger to Alphie’s Frankenstein body count.

I’ll spare the details, but I amputated one support that was made of 14-gauge steel (I only have 16-gauge) and that gave the reference measurements I needed.

The excision took about two hours of Thursday afternoon.  Straightening and prepping the piece took another two.

A good blogger would have taken pictures of the whole process.  Unfortunately, you’re reading my blog. 

The Un-Doing

Friday afternoon started with fitting the piece of Bob’s Butt to Alphie.  No pictures, so I’ll pause while you imagine the cutting, the straightening, the cleaning, the rust treating, the fitting, the grinding, the filing, the supplemental measuring, the second, third, etc. fittings...  Pause some more; it was a week’s worth of tedious.

That’s about three-plus hours of Friday afternoon.  Add another two hours of Saturday morning for spot welding the flanges for the rocker panels attachment, an extra couple of fittings, bead blasting, priming and MIG welding it to aft leg of Alphie’s x-member. 

Un-Doing all the pieces I had laboriously fitted the weekend before and prepping everything for the Re-Do took the rest of Saturday and the first hour or so of Sunday.  As it turns out, my ugly welds stubbornly resist “letting go.”  Oh, let’s not forget bending the shackle back to its correct position. 

Plenty of measuring, all of which was about a week late.

The Re-Doing

Sunday, after finishing Saturday’s work, I made a paper template of the bracket that goes above the shackle and boxes it all together.  Make that two paper templates; I decided that I would have to make the bracket in two pieces and spot weld them together to get the measurements and shape I needed.

No pics, of course.  Here’s a drawing to help you visualize it.

Not drawn to scale
nor particularly well

Hold it – I forgot that I hadn’t made the third support that connects the inside of the shackle box to the inside leg of the x-member.  It’s in the drawing.  It’s a fairly simple fabrication, but it took three pieces of file folder to get the shape right, and I had to MIG weld on a flange because it’s curved – um, I didn’t MIG anything to the paper template.  Work with me here.  (Refer to the drawing because, again, I didn’t take any pictures.)

(Note:  It's a kerspIoded view.  I circled the parts I fabbed in red.  The blue arrows are supposed to show you how it all glues together.)

Each side of an Alpine’s forward leaf spring shackle is reinforced by three pieces of sheet metal.  They were a bugger to retro-build and retrofit, but they are plenty strong.  

It’s about 2:00 Sunday afternoon, but I have all the pieces bolted and/or vice gripped into place.  I mentioned it before, but this is when I noticed the bolt wasn’t at a right angle to the center-line of the car.  Geez!

What to do?  I slotted the bolt hole that was incorrect.  It was the outside hole, thankfully, because slotting the inside hole would have been a test of ingenuity and forbearance.  OK, with a slotted hole and machine square in hand, I corrected the right angle correct and weld a 3/8^th thick washer on to create the new bolt hole.  Not stock looking but aligned!

Welded but not cleaned or primed
(I see things that won't work already)

I finish Sunday with MIGing and grinding aplenty!  I added a new grinder from my Dad’s stash for a total of three.  When you weld ugly, you need a ready supply of grinders.

The driver’s side x-member only needs half this much fiddling, and me having learned what not to do!  Pity.

When I install Alphie’s new floor pans, I’ll tidy-up the welds, maybe add a small cover to prevent water from getting to all my ugly welds.  I’ll decide that later.

Next up:

Rocker – friggin – panels!  Finally!  I have already surveyed the pieces of Bob’s Butt I’ll need to get the alignment of fender to rocker panel.

I will endeavor to take pictures next time – no promises…