After finally waving goodbye to whatever germ had parked itself in my upper body for the last few weeks I recommenced the assault on the Sprite of Sunshine. Just sitting there in the back yard it had been giving me the irrits, knowing it needed just a couple of days of intense work to get it into shape where I could start organizing the important things like the motor......
In the book I should have written called "Workshop Practice for Idiots" there would have been an introductory chapter called "tack welds". When you use something sporadically you gradually and randomly lose skills, often without realising it. The first thing you forget when welding , or not welding is the placement of appropriate tack welds, they should be easy to remove, and they should at least be strong enough to stay there for , aw, five minutes?
No , don't put that tack weld in the corner there where you can't get at it with a disc, no, don't lay a full bead, it's supposed to be temporary............
I think I got a little excited a few weeks back,
everything just seemed to fit right. Well that was until I started to dismantle things a little more, the radius rods, the tie rod.......each piece that came off was a datum point that had made it all make sense. Once I had a front and a rear end, and two rails it sort of went into flux a little bit...that and the bit where I wrote down the ACTUAL wheelbase.... so I had to work it out again.
It took a while to get the laser aligners calibrated but once that was organized I whacked it on the chassis jig.
I welded it in all the places that I couldn't easily get a cut off wheel into and then took it back to the tank....
I'd made a start on stripping out the bottom section of the tank as it was going to be cut time soon...
It left me with a few bulkhead pieces...one of them has "Front bottom" written on it....
Turns out I was still shooting a little wide and would have to narrow the chassis at the front....you'll also notice I was about to have a bit of an interference problem where the front axle was getting chummy with the rails.I haven't any photos but the chassis got notched there and reinforced with some heavy angle...
After that it was time to get the rear end into some sort of shape, I'll cut some pieces of 1/4 plate and sandwich the rail and weld the 1/4 to the axle tube
Looking better from that end....
It was at about this time that the Reverend turned up.... I was cutting clearances out of the tank skin.....
Then I took a bold step and cut a big hole in the top of it....
from there it was just a short step to jumping in it and making brm brm brrrrrm noises.
yep 5 years old....
