Friday, January 26, 2007

Smugglers Box Going in........

Here are some pics of the smugglers box gettting welded in. I drilled holes every 2" along the top and bottom of the panel and will plug weld all along the top and bottom




















Welds are getting better too, nice and flat with no blow thru

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Trial fitting the back panels....

Here are a few shots of the back panels getting fitted. This is the lower smugglers box panel that gets welded to the back. This piece fits amazingly well for a repro piece. It's made by Dynacorn and will work much better than the old rusted piece.
Sprayed with good coat of zinc primer:








Next, put a nice thick coat of seam sealer:








Trial fit the new smugglers box piece:

Welding in the Center Strip into Floor Pans

Spent part of the morning getting the center piece trimmed and fit for the middle of the floor pan. Seems stupid they don't both to make the pans wide enough to weld together. I just need to finish up the piece on the tranny hump and it's good.

Here is after it's trimmed:













Here the strip is tacked:














I used a piece of blue masking tape to mark off how much to cut:













Now here is the piece tacked into place:

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Firewall prepped and painted with POR

Spent the evening getting the firewall ready for some POR15 silver. I like this product but it has it's good and bad sides. The area is not that rusty , just a bit of surface rust at most. I prefer to use POR on this since its a strong tough finish. I will be topcoating with some epoxy when the floors are finished. Here are a few pics of before and after.

BEFORE:













After:














Sunday, January 14, 2007

Pans are both in

I just finished putting in the right pan. Went in pretty well and pleased with the results. I have become a much better welder now as a result. The only thing left is to get the center strip cut and tacked into the middle. Then grind down the welds and it should be ready for epoxy.

Here are a few pics of the progress:

Sunday, January 07, 2007

More pan action

I have been spending lots of time trying to get this done right. I learned the hard way on the left pan. If the pan is not sitting right on the brace, when you weld the floor to the pan it wants to lift up. I have a few spots on the left side that didn't come out well. I have been using some small sheet metal screws here are there. Also, start welding from the middle to the out side. I made the mistake of taking the outter edges. By the time I got to the outer edge, there was no room for the metal to go. So a little pounding with a BFH fixed the problem, not perfect but it will work.

Friday, January 05, 2007

Floor Pan Fiesta

Been working on getting the floor pans prepped and ready to weld in.
Both braces have been cleaned and stripped to bare metal and some Eastwood Rust Encapsulator has been sprayed on both. I sanded down the edges and sprayed some weld thru primer for where the pans meet the braces.
Here is a shot of the pans getting ready to go in:














Left pan all welded in now...



















Firewall all prepped and now straight as its going to get. Had to hammer and dolly the booster area.













front left fender epoxied and ready to get sprayed with last coat of epoxy.