Been playing catchup for a while since my cross-country venture, time for some long overdue updates. Finishing up on our tailgate, the last stainless pieces of the puzzle came from McMillan Rod and Custom in WI. Pretty good source for polished stainless trim pieces...
We had emailed them dimensions for existing holes in the tailgate, and the welded studs were spot on.
All our stainless parts added for a test fit/pre-drill/pre-screw of all the hardware to insure they'd go in straight during final assembly. Here's my contribution to the upholstery effort on the car....
And our tailgate installed....
And our update would not be complete without the requisite back up and punt moment. As we were closing the tailgate there was a slight binding as the tailgate was all but closed. Hey, you know my luck by now. Seems our trial fit in bare metal showed no issues but now we had multiple layers of paint that didn't want to play nice. The hinge notches in the bottom of the tailgate skin were digging into the inside of the hinges..
At this point a hinge is an easier repair than a completed tailgate, so the hinges were milled down .080 on that face and the countersunk holes deepened that much as well..
Then about three rounds of epoxy, block, repeat to eliminate the casting flaws, and on to the organic green kandy basecoat once more...
And then groundhog day, install it once more, with much better results this time.
Some updates on the shop truck... When I picked up the vintage farm tags in Delaware the gentleman was having a men's yard sale with plenty of car parts, etc. I picked up some stainless hub caps and trim rings, I just needed to hammer out some dings and paint the letters.
I had installed a used SUN tach to keep track of the rpm's. Not the one I wanted, but you just don't find used Rotunda tachs sitting on a shelf. Or do you... a couple weeks after installing the SUN I found a gentleman in Idaho that rebuilds the Rotunda's. He did have one rebuilt, ready to go. I will say the Rotunda is like a fine Swiss watch when compared to the Sun, a high-quality movement.
The Rotundra did come with a stainless flat mount for installing on a dashboard, and I needed a column mount so let's fabricate...
Another thing I was looking at doing was to fill out those rear wheel wells with a bit more tire. I had searched far and wide for a 15 x 8 stock steel wheel but they always seemed to have the wrong back spacing. I finally had more luck when a friend said he had some Jeep wheels in that size, with the correct bolt pattern. A test fit showed the back spacing to put this one about as dead center in the wheel well as you can get.
Now we have the wheels media blasted and dropped off for powder coating.
The tires installed should have about 3/4" clearance on either side..
Well, it's about high time we got back on the console...
We had designed the "hoop" to go around each leg of the horseshoe shifter, and to hold bulb seal rather than a strip brush, for a cleaner look. When we ordered the shifter it came with the new clear bezel for gear indication, but since we didn't have the factory console and it's matching parts, it was a bit much for us to incorporate into our fabricated console. In an attempt at simpler is better, one of the hoops was made with a wider flange for adding gear indicator nomenclature.
Well, we have been waiting awhile for our turn in line at the machine shop, and that day finally arrived
Next was the layout of the locations...
The ends of the slots were cut using a 5/8 diameter RotaCut, joined together between with a Milwaukee M18 14 ga shear, and trimmed afterwards using Wurth snips.
Then the 4-way power window switch was added to the rear, using the same process.
And lastly, our AC vents added. I didn't have any RotoCuts in the 2-1/2 diameter, so we opted for using a hole saw. They can be sketchy when cutting through sheet metal, with the pilot drill wanting to pull the hole sideways. So we sacrificed an extra holesaw arbor to make a bolt-in guide, and changed the pilot bit out for a piece of 1/4 round stock.
just fyi, if you ever need a wheel with a specific offset, these guys https://amwheelspecialist.com/ are local to me and pretty much exclusively do custom offset to your wheels.
We've been working on the wiring, starting with the gauge cluster. A loop was added between the gauge's mounting screws to provide a bit of strain relief for its harness.
Some of the bundles coming off the fusebox were excessively long, so we made use of fresh connector contacts to shorten the length so we won't have a rat's nest to hide under the dash. We did find the wires to the dimmer switch were too short by a couple inches, so the wires were re-routed too the side of the fuse box for a more direct approach.
The addition of the FI Tech and HyFire 6A ignition components gave us some challenges for power feed wires, so some circuits were changed to "keyed" in order to provide the additional battery circuits required. The original text is easily removed with a few scrapes of a utility blade. My lettering skills are nothing to write home about, and given the size, I used a double stack of lens for these old eyes in the form of reading glasses and a cheater lens inside the welding helmet. First time I've used a welding helmet to paint something.
We needed a mounting location for the Ignition module, and I still can't bring myself to drill holes in this firewall and hang such a wart on it.
Since we had shaved the radio location to clean up the dash, this provided a bit of real estate directly behind the dash.
Our stainless trim insert we made for the dash provided us some hardware for a mounting plate, but the thread length was a bit short.
Some 8-32 rivnuts were selected to match the dash hardware, and 10-32 hex nuts were drilled to accept these (press fit). The rivnuts were trimmed to length, pressed in the hex nuts, and fusion welded using the TIG around the joint.
The plate is .09 thick 6061, and press nuts were used on the back side for bolting the Hyfire to the plate.
Shop truck update, I had some exhaust parts left under the tree. A 2-1/2" mandrel bend kit and a pair of Black Widow Venom 250's.
We had a spot going through a crossmember that was a bit snug, so we made a set of dies to flatten the pipe, as well as a plug for the end of the pipe to keep it round for welding to the next piece. Some quick geometry gave us the size and offset needed. Yeah, one of those classes from high school they say you'll never use again.
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