Page Fifteen - Winging It!

A thoroughly mangled wing!

A quick update - Alphie enters a new phase of restoration, stuff that will actually show!  My biggest challenge from day one has been replacing Alphie's crumpled nose.  I'm finally there!

Cancer Treatment - Round Umpteen

Alphie is right side up, her rotisserie has been tweaked, and she’s ready for her next round of cancer treatment.

First Protocol: Remove a Wing, the passenger side first.  With solid rockers, I’m prepping Alphie for her snoz transplant, and like everything else, when I sawed off the passenger front wing (fender for the yanks), I found rust growing with kudzu-like abandon.  So de-rusting is the goal.

Wingless with all the rust showing

The lower back corners of the wheel wells, where floors meet firewall meet wings and wheel wells is particularly fertile soil for rust.  Wingless and in the full light of day, the rust defiantly sneers.  I take the spike of my body hammer and tap around to find the deepest pockets of rust, creating cascades of flaky rust and find several spots of serious infection.  In several places, the metal breaks away leaving holes where I must fit and weld new sheet metal.  Marshal the grinders!

Second Protocol: Cut, Cut, Cut.  Fit the small grinder with the cutting disc and get at it.  I cut until I find healthy metal and a suitable place where I can most easily fit and weld in patches.  Except for the lower corners of the wheel wells, most of the new metal will be covered by the wing and wheel well, so it needs to be strong and rust protected, but not necessarily pretty.

Another view after one patch

Pencil, marker, file folders, scissors, belt sander, band saw – template making.  With each new template, I’m slowly getting better at fitting patches.  Sometimes the learning curve is a long arc.  Sunbeam’s version of 16-gauge sheet metal is thinner than Lowes’ version – I think I’ve said that before, but it never led to any corrective actions, until now.  

I finally started adjusting the amperage on the MIG welder; you would think that I would have learned this earlier…  I had set the MIG to weld Lowe’s metal, and it welded it with ease and efficiency.  But when joining Lowes metal to Sunbeam metal, I was joyfully burning holes in Alphie’s tissue.  Lowering the amperage mitigates burn throughs but doesn’t completely eliminate them.  Must improve welding skills!

Third Protocol: Weld, Grind, Weld, Grind.  With patches fitted, I blaze away with the MIG.  Since the patches are thicker than Alphie tissue as I have mentioned, I can’t run a continuous weld line.  I have to connect tack weld so that I don’t put too much heat into the thinner metal.  The problem is that the finished weld looks like a row of warts that require copious grinding.  Even when the patches are welded and ground, it looks like surgery done after Dr. Frankenstein spent a few nights closing down the bars.

After etch priming, I will mix up some JB Weld and use it like plastic filler to smooth out the welds that will show inside the wheel wells.  JB Weld is harder to file and sand to finish, but it is so much stronger than plastic fillers.  Eventually, the wheel wells will be factory fresh and a little stronger than the original.

Patches welded in with more to come

Painted with POR-15 and the wing trimmed to the fire wall and inner wing

Detail showing the attaching surfaces for the Organ Donor's wing

Update: After cleaning up the driver wheel well - ready to fit new metal

Update: Snoz ectomy complete!  Some clean up done, more to come

Page Fourteen – The Snoz

It’s been a while and work has been done, it’s just that it’s kind of boring.  Important, but boring.

Rinse and Repeat

I covered building the driver’s side inner rocker panels, but the passenger side was almost the same, just a bit easier, less rust and rot.  Alphie has two very solid inner rockers now, which means I can get to the nose transplant, to wit…

Passenger side inner rocker panel complete -
I'll tidy things up when I apply the new snoz.

Snozectomy

I took the scalpel to the Organ Donor’s nose first because there was more room for error and removing it would inform me about how to remove Alphie’s snoz.

So, what did I learn?  First, hacking off Alphie’s nose will be easier than hacking off the Organ Donor’s nose was.  I purposefully cut more than I will need from the Donor.  The idea is to get it off the car and slowly and carefully whittle my way to the metal that will meet Alphie’s body.  That way I get clean metal to weld where the original body panels met, making my welds to mimic factory welds.  Having said that, cutting on the Donor was a merry free-for-all.  I didn’t have to be that careful to make the cuts clean so I took to the grinders like Michael Meyers with a chainsaw.

The second thing I learned is that I will not replace as much of Alphie as I first thought.  I thought I would need to keep the Donor’s inner fender wells and attach the Donor’s nose to Alphie’s front frame rails.  As I dug into the Donor, I found that the Donor’s wells were not any better than Alphie’s and that not cutting out the fender well will be a smoking lot easier and less likely to screw up the alignment.  That was a big find!

Clearly not a factory weld

Incidentally, I burned through three 7” cutting discs, four 4 1/2” cutting discs and a 4” thin grinding disc; the cordless Sawzall got in on it too.  But as you can see, the Organ Donor’s disembodied nose now awaits cleaning and fitting.

I removed the factory – well, it was factory on one side – leaded seams with a propane torch and wire brush.  Once I got below the lead on the passenger side, the weld is clearly not a factory weld so the left wing may be a replacement.  If it is a replacement, it’s about to go on its third Alpine.  I plan to replace the lead to fill the welds as well as other many of the dents.  (It's still called "leading" but it doesn't actually use lead, way too toxic.)

That's what a factory weld looks like.

The Donor under the knife, day one.

The Carcass

The Organ Donor is looking more and more like roadkill that the birds have picked over.  Now our front yard is adorned with a mangled mass of metal threatening many jagged and angry edges very likely to require a tetanus booster.  But progress!

Some post-surgical shots

Disembodied nose

Ready to be cleaned and prepped

Careful, you may bleed just looking at all that ragged metal 

P.S. I apologize to all the wildlife left homeless because of my actions.

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…

A Vintage Plate for Alphie

My collection of vintage Alabama License plates - 1963, 1964 (2) and 1965

Page Eleven: Alphie's Vintage 1964 Alabama License Plate

I have scrounged an original Alabama license plate for all of my projects cars’ (and motorcycle) year of manufacture and Alphie has one too.  Finding a pristine original plate would be ideal, but their owners tend to value them more than I do.  Fortunately, beat-up rusty plates are reasonably priced and easy to find on EBay, but they need, like their intended cars, a bit of work.

BUT! This time I found an original never issued 1964 Alabama license plate!  It’s a plate from Calhoun County (#11), not Madison (#47) where I hang out.  I have been searching for a 47 tag for about a year, but every one I found was shredded, trashed, junk.  Alphie deserves a pretty tag. 

Alphie's Unissued 1964 Alabama Plate

My tag restoration attempts are acceptable, until it comes to painting the numbers.  The ones I hand painted looked, well, hand painted.  I was going to send my EBay tags to be professionally restored but then I found the Tag Doctor – look up his website; he has some cool stuff and solid prices.

So other than some pics of my  tags, both restored and (partially) restored, here is some interesting/useless dribble about vintage tags.

Useless Trivia

When I started the Sunbeam Alpine Project, I had a 1965 Alpine, but if you have read the other posts on this blog, you know that now I’m building a 1964 Alpine – see the Organ Donor post.  I remind you of this so that the following paragraph, discussing a 1965 plate, will make at least some sense.

The plate I EBayed (back in April of 2019) for Alphie, a 1965 “Heart of Dixie” plate number 11-3047, was rusted and sun-faded to the point that I was unsure of the original colors, so I went a-Googling.  I discovered something interesting from Google, my college football fanatics…

In 1964 the state of Alabama issued vehicle license plates decked out in the Crimson and White of the University of Alabama– Roll Tide!

And in 1965, Alabama emblazoned plates with the Blue and Orange of Auburn University.  War Damn Eagle!

1965 Auburn plate - no lettering

More Useless Trivia:  The “11” on the Auburn plate means it was issued in Calhoun County in north central Alabama where Anniston is the county seat.  (Finding a specific county is difficult, but who knows, I might trip over a 1965 plate with the “47” of Madison County somewhere.  (Editor’s Note:  I didn’t!)

The “county” number, the first number or two numbers before the dash, are based on county populations as of 1942.  So in 1942, Calhoun County was the 11^th most populous county in Alabama, while Madison County was the 47^th.  (Incidentally, Jefferson was first, with Mobile and Montgomery counties coming in second and third respectively, hence their 1,2,3 county numbers.)  In 1979, Alabama officially locked the 1942 numbers.

The “3047” is the serial number of the plate, which lets the cop know who must pay the ticket.

The “Heart of Dixie” slogan and the embossed heart was added to plates in 1951.

Registering a Original Vintage Plate

According to Section 40-12-297 of the Code of Alabama, Alabamians “may request to register an original Alabama license plate, 1976 or previous, including a restored or refurbished Alabama license plate, issued in the model year as designated by the manufacturer of the vehicle, of a type license plate that would have been issued to that category vehicle.”  The phrase, “that would have been issued to that category vehicle,” means you have to use 1964 passenger car tags for 1964 cars, 1964 pick-up tags for 1964 pick-up trucks and, I suppose, 1964 hearse tags for 1964 hearses, if hearses are your thing.

The license plate folks will give me “a permanent vintage vehicle validation decal” that must be displayed on the lower portion of the plate.  So it won’t look exactly like it would have in 1965, but laws are laws, and it’s very cool that Alabama allows us to use original plates!

Blasting and Cleaning

(Editor’s Note: I wrote this post last year (April 2019) when I fully intended to restore a tag for Alphie.  Even though I found an never issues tag, I figure I’ll post my how-to write up because… why the hell not?

I have restored tags before – see the pics.  I restored one for my 63 Corvair Monza and on for my 64 Impala SS – so the write up comes from at least some experience.)

The first step is finding the clean metal.  I bead blasted, wire wheeled and sanded both plates to a clean shiny metal. 

(The 1964 plate is the one I kept from the 64 Impala SS I restored back in the 90’s - such a sweet ride!  By the way, the superscript “H” to the right of the "5" means that it was for a pick-up, ¾ ton or less.)

Keeping the “Original Look” – Not Over-Restored

I used a high-build primer to fill rust pits and scratches, but that’s all.  A glass-flat, pristine license plate looks fake.  They came with lumps from the AL DMV in 1964, so Alphie’s plate will be lumpy too.

You can see the tooling impressions -
original plates aren't pristine

Even though I’m restoring the tags, I plan to preserve the original look.  Plates were stamped and painted at Kilby Prison near Montgomery, and a plate’s original “fit and finish” was a little shy of awesome.  For example, I can see the outline of the jig, which held the stamping dies indented above and below the numbers, and the area between the numbers and letters was never completely flat.  I’m leaving tooling marks like these visible.

Similarly, of the original plates I have dealt with, the tooling often cuts through the metal at the edge of a letter or number.  Both of my plates have these cuts, and I will not fix them either.  (See the pics)

A flashlight behind the plate shows where the die
cut through the metal - original plates aren't pristine

I am going to straighten the edges and bang out any injuries the plates suffered during their time on and off their original vehicle over the past 54 years, just not the lumps from their original pressing.

Base Coat

Dupli-Color has engine paint in the base colors very close the red and blue I need.  A couple of coats with some light wet sanding between coats and a coat of clear for extra gloss should do it.  Be careful with the clear coat, it often crinkles the base coat under it.

Lettering Paint

A roller system on (what I assume) was an assembly line setup applied the original lettering paint.  Reproducing the original roller application is difficult, makes a big mess and doesn’t work very well – at least that’s what I read on the internet.  At any rate,  making a Rube Goldberg roller system to paint the letters on one plate doesn’t make much sense.  So Testor’s model paint and a steady hand are the call for lettering.

Hand painted model paint
just isn't good enough

(Editor’s Note:  Here’s where the post diverges from the facts of Alphie’s new tag.  I hand lettered the 1963 plate, and you can see that the lettering looks uneven and “redone,” in short it looks terrible.  

The original lettering paint was sorta reflective, not very, but sorta.  Testor’s model paint ain’t reflective, in fact it’s not very good lettering paint at all.  I read that some restorers sprinkle reflective granules into the lettering paint to reproduce the paint’s reflectivity.  The granules are usually more reflective than the original paint, so it’s a little better than original.)

The model paint doesn’t hold up against rocks and other debris that bang against the tag.  Check out the chipping on the 1963 tag, which I used as the front tag of my Corvair.

I hand painted the lettering on the 63 plate
It's acceptable, but still looks "redone"

Go with the Pros

Garage plate restoration is acceptable, but if you want a slick plate that doesn’t look like you rescued it from a barn wall somewhere, get it professionally done.  I started hand painting the EBay 1964 tag, but I was not happy with the results of the first couple of letters.  Honestly, it looked like it was restored during arts & crafts at summer camp. 

I decided that I was never going to get the look I wanted by hand painting.  I found the Tag Doctor's website while I was researching blokes who restore plates professionally.

Professional plate restorers’ prices range from reasonable to flagrant, depending on what level of restoration you want.  Do a quick web search, you’ll find them.  Since they restore tags every day, they have invested in the right tools and paints to make your tag look like it did back in the day.

A close-up of Alphie's never-issued 1964 plate
 with its straight from the prison lettering!

A shout out to the guy with the vintage tags