Misc. Mechanical & Metal Fabrication

[Loren]

That pussy is an old man who has one full-size dog very respectful of him, and the other terrified. He once ran across the yard and jumped onto a dog's back and it howled like it had been hit by a car, seems they had a history. (I laughed for ten minutes.) As a kitten he once wrestled a ground squirrel that was bigger than he was, it was like a National Geographic Special, the rodent eventually threw him and got away. Eyesight has caused him to not be the hunter he once was but the attitude is all there.

Looks like Johnny Joints for the rear lower control arms, they are available in the size I need. Off-road parts should be up to the rear-of-car dirt and moisture.

[SuperBuickGuy]

That pussy is an old man who has one full-size dog very respectful of him, and the other terrified. He once ran across the yard and jumped onto a dog's back and it howled like it had been hit by a car, seems they had a history. (I laughed for ten minutes.) As a kitten he once wrestled a ground squirrel that was bigger than he was, it was like a National Geographic Special, the rodent eventually threw him and got away. Eyesight has caused him to not be the hunter he once was but the attitude is all there.

Looks like Johnny Joints for the rear lower control arms, they are available in the size I need. Off-road parts should be up to the rear-of-car dirt and moisture.

I'm a fan of Johnny joints. It's what's under my FJ40... 8/9 years of abuse and still work great

[Loren]

Red/black interior 1984 TBI Corvettes keep following me home. They have no market interest and are dirt-cheap, while I personally consider them to be historically significant. I now have three. This is not crashed, just partially disassembled. 85K miles/garage-kept, but an automatic car so it'll get parted (kind-of a shame).



The first one I bought, which will be my "keeper" has well over 300K miles on it (speaks to some longevity) and there's a lot here it can use.

For SBG's uncle whoever-it-is, my buddy picked up this '74 with '82 parts and a tri-power big block.

[SuperBuickGuy]

no smog car, cool.

[Loren]

Kit car body/front end test fit. This is a rolling chassis now, steers and everything.




The intent was to keep the front tires in the original fenders but have the rear flared out a little. Problems w/ the rear: one side sticks out about .4 inch further than the other. The chassis measures good so I'm going to have to believe there's some asymmetry in the body, probably a tolerance stack-up of features between the rocker mounting and fender lips. I figured on correcting that by narrowing one side of the suspension just a little more, meaning a half-shaft will have to be re-cut/welded, again, there's already a bit over five inches cut off each side of the Corvette C4 suspension (w/ C3 diff). The small difference won't hurt anything. However there is also this matter: Those wheels are 16x8 from Vintage Wheel Works around '05 (I had them on the Impala) but at the time I wanted the rears wider and nothing was available in 16" cast one-piece so I cut them up and welded another inch into them to make 16x9s. All good for that car that might go 70 mph but I have second thoughts on this one that I imagine driving faster. Since they are very close copies of American Racing Torque-Thrusts which were available in 16x8.5, if I could find a pair of those instead, I'd be set.



And so I did, after some months of keeping an eye on the classifieds. These came from the son of the original purchaser from the late-sixties, they were on a '55 Chev, then lay out in the yard for who-knows how long. The outer-rim-to-mounting surface is 3/4" deeper than my re-pops, which I think will look good with the slightly-flared rear fenders and should work with 255/50R16 C4 'Vette tires. Now I get to re-narrow both sides of my rear suspension, that will be the next project, and the rims will need to have a little material cut off to get past the corrosion pitting and polish up (they are thick, heavy wheels and won't be bothered any). Slow progress.

[DanStokes]

Always love your posts. Again, I wish we lived closer together.

[cstmwgn]

Look what I saw today!

[Loren]

Too cool! What a rare sight.
Nice finish work. Smooth, classy "Series 1" that looks like an Austin-Healy chassis configuration (...?), probably the sweetest type. I'm doing mine the way I am but that green car w/ 150hp or so would be plenty of fun.

That's a good display of what the original designers (brothers from Wisconsin, working in CA) had in mind. The younger one surfaced on Facebook when someone started a page, still has body #1 and recently got it running again after sitting since 1974...except for color (red) it's nearly a dead-ringer for the one above. See: Facebook

Standing next to it you get an idea of how small it is. It makes the MGB in the pic look like a normal-size car.

[Loren]

Photo w/ the "new" rear wheels with deeper offset and the rear narrowed another inch. I should be becoming an expert at cutting down aluminum half-shafts by now and I had to dump my original C4 trailing links for drilled/tapped DOM tube and more Johnny Joints due to frame interference issues. The idea, again, is to flare the rear fenders a bit to get the lips over the tires and have the rear be a little wider than the front.

I am at a stage where I need to have in hand the actual motor/trans I'm going to use, in order to continue fabrication. Just fooling around, I've come up with enough motor mount variations that work with different AC compressor and exhaust manifold details that I may have problems if I just shoot from the hip. There is also the matter of do I want to build headers, or not. Three-day job there, at minimum, in my experience.

Along w/ LS I have lately considered an old-school small-block Chevy with '60 GT-style 8-stack injection using EFI, after coming across this:

Chevy SBC 350 Downdraft EFI Stack Intake Manifold System Complete Polished | eBay

Note the linked part is a Speedmaster unit, who are notorious for producing China copies on a grand scale and were recently outed for not noticing that their China-copy factory actually machined in the brand name of the copied part then boxed 'em up in a Speedmaster carton for sale. They lost their Summit listing deal for that, although Jegs has no such standards. That is a negative, anyway. If I wanted to I suppose I could just machine off the very-prominent Speedmaster logo but I would still know what I have. (The likely-sampled Inglese unit is out of my price range.) It should be possible to make 350 HP.? I'm leery of the computer issues but it seems to me like an intake manifold/throttle body is just that...give a SBC motor crank, cam, MAP, TPS and O2 sensors and proper-size injectors and provided you use a speed-density deal w/o MAF shouldn't it run just like a stock LS and maybe even use an LS computer? It might be cool to have an 8-stack sticking through the hood. Or maybe it wouldn't, I dunno. I have determined the Magnuson LS from the GTO would also need the hood cut and have the front half of the blower, throttle body and ducting in view. Again, cool...or not?

In any event it's going to have to just sit for a couple months now while I have to focus on other things. At least I've gotten this far.

[SuperBuickGuy]

you'd think they wouldn't want their name on most of those parts.

[Loren]

A cursory glance shows Speedmaster consisting of; the son of the Australian founder enjoying the fruits of an inherited triangle of copy-business anchors which are his home Australia, a huge distribution center in the smog-sewer end of Los Angeles and of-course China who provides the eager University-graduate copy-engineers and hard-working/making-a-living-for-their-families copy-manufacturers. Apparently their copy-skills and perhaps a few bucks were enough to impress the much-vaunted Richard Holdener into You-Tubing a smiling schil-session for the product.

Downdraft System for Small Block Chevy from Speedmaster. - YouTube

Yet it is for me to not judge too harshly what motivations are. Also, others say, the quality is pretty good on that item at-least. Do I care what the deal is behind it? Sigh. I cannot have a problem with foreign-sourced copies of items that you just wouldn't have on the market otherwise. Car fenders that were discontinued by the OEM 40 years ago for example. Or if Snap-On wants $200 for something I would never buy at that price for my own use, but HF has a version for $20 and I might need it someday, I'll bite. I think where we get into trouble is where a guy in the U.S. develops a product then a year later while he's still getting his investment back, Speedmaster cuts in and basically steals it. I dunno.

[SuperBuickGuy]

A cursory glance shows Speedmaster consisting of; the son of the Australian founder enjoying the fruits of an inherited triangle of copy-business anchors which are his home Australia, a huge distribution center in the smog-sewer end of Los Angeles and of-course China who provides the eager University-graduate copy-engineers and hard-working/making-a-living-for-their-families copy-manufacturers. Apparently their copy-skills and perhaps a few bucks were enough to impress the much-vaunted Richard Holdener into You-Tubing a smiling schil-session for the product.

Downdraft System for Small Block Chevy from Speedmaster. - YouTube

Yet it is for me to not judge too harshly what motivations are. Also, others say, the quality is pretty good on that item at-least. Do I care what the deal is behind it? Sigh. I cannot have a problem with foreign-sourced copies of items that you just wouldn't have on the market otherwise. Car fenders that were discontinued by the OEM 40 years ago for example. Or if Snap-On wants $200 for something I would never buy at that price for my own use, but HF has a version for $20 and I might need it someday, I'll bite. I think where we get into trouble is where a guy in the U.S. develops a product then a year later while he's still getting his investment back, Speedmaster cuts in and basically steals it. I dunno.

I can't watch Holdener. I've tried but ended up needing to buy another monitor.

He, like most others, on Youtube are this self-feeding group of inter-sponsors. With that said, I learned a lot from watching some of these but those days are pretty scarce anymore.... now they just hype each other and make a sadder version of TV stars seeking recognition. Wonder how long it will be before they realize that all that noise of adulation is coming from other folks who want them to magic validate their existence by thumbs upping, subscribing and commenting? It's mostly a matter of pride for me that YouTube videos are nothing more or less than a way of updating without the need to really put a lot of thought of effort into things....

Speedmaster - I thought they were dead after Summit tossed their stuff? If they are anything but a fantastic argument to 'buy American' I don't know what else they would be? certainly not a supplier of useable auto parts.

Jegs - when they dumped money into 'freebies' for people like Jessie James, my thought was "well, you certainly don't need my money" add to this these couple things: 1) if you ask for a discount from them, they will demand you give them a list of products they'll never give you in hopes that by the time you realize this that you're too tired to buy those products elsewhere, and 2) they use exclusively FedUp - I honestly don't know of a better way of telling your customers that you don't care about what they want and they can pound sand then by that decision.

Part of the fun of SEMA is watching the copycats trying to get enough photos of whatever they're going to steal next year....

[Loren]

Look what I saw today!

Hope you don't mind if I send your photos over to the Jamaican site on facebook...

[cstmwgn]

No problem at all. I took it mostly to share with you and your free to do with it as you please.

[Loren]

Decided to try to get something done on the Camaro which parts for I've been stepping over for years. Always a bit of progress then it sits. I am now block-sanding this out with my go-to favorite backing material, strips of quarter-inch Masonite...even the best rubber sanding blocks just follow the dips and bumps instead of cutting them straight but the Masonite cuts a good surface while it flexes just enough. With that, have a look at those bumps and dips, shown by the various levels of guide coat, primer-surfacer and self-etch primer sanded through. If you were to count individual areas, big and small, that needed work it would be around 250 for the car. Seems unending.