Alright here is a play by play of 2.5 nights ( when I wasn't distracted by other things I thought were less tedious)
Look at hole that needs to be filled and plan course of action:
Weld flanges on and cut out the first template:
Discover the way I made the shifter is way to short and has a bad throw when the seat is in place :banghead: you can see in later pics that the shifter now sits taller and swings farther back courtesy of that piece of angle being welded in there.
Not shown here is the fact that with the modifications you see the tunnel cover is actually V 2.0 as with the different throw I had to move the slot location or that the tacks I put on broke on 3 seperate occasions while bending the shifter to fit beside the seat and that means unbolting and rebolting it every time :
Doesn't it look beautiful? Shut up it's a work of art. :lmao:
Alright template # 2, I want it to be a nice tight fit.
Well the Princess Auto metal shear and I had a disagreement about where the line was (maybe I was tired but I swear it looked like it was on the line until after I cut it)
So that led me to either having to put a plate behind there, or recut the piece but I had been saving that piece for weeks because I knew it almost fit there in the first place. So I started working on how to put my seals on the outside edge of my panels. I had been putting them on the inside flanges to fit the 90` angles but the seal was too big and bowed my panels and the edges of the panels still all needed trimming. So I fingered out how to make the seals to do a 90 on the outside, of course the seals which are old door seals are very durable. Like filled with wire to keep their form durable, so after trying tin snips, side cutters and razor cutters I came up with using a cut-off saw as the ultimate solution.......rubber, plastic, metal are all no match for it. Of course wear gloves and be very careful when notching. I guess I will have to take a picture of the finished product lol. And that was 2.5 evenings.
The next night was just as fun, I had to fill in this mess of unfinished ends, now that was some tedious template making, metal cutting and welding, the joy of working with existing framework, I did a pretty nice job but you probably won't see that until it is finished and painted.
Which leads me to a another weekend of still no wheeling but I have seatbelt attachment points courtesy of more 3/4" bar.
So then I finished up some welding here and there and thought about fading the orange on the top to a lighter orange.
YIKES!!!
Connie comes out just as I finish and asks me WTH I am doing and in my tired state of mind I say "well it's a fade" and she says "your buddies are going to call that peach" and I am like "yeah I know" so she takes over painting and I mix white in with the minute amount of "peach" I have and does some funky things with the foam brush so the old colour shows through.
At midnight I see it drying to a horrendous shade of bathroom orange so I pour a new batch of pure white and cover it all over. Once again pics later, just use your imagination now, stop imagining peach it's white you fools.
Coil spring retainers for the bottom which I made from looking at pics on the interweb, boy I wish Mike Lorint lived closer as my stuff would look a lot nice when they were done but they are functional. Now you would think that those nice little circles I cut out would be perfect for capturing the top of the coil on the inside. Well I did too but they were too small and I had to measure and cut them seperately after trying.
A cool pic of the truck front to back before covered in which shows the exhaust very well mounted on very secure double rubber mounts (yes I am grasping but it is really well mounted)
And because I needed something else to slow me down my brand new fuel cell from Summit has a snapped off bolt (cross-threaded from the factory) and is rusty metal for a flange inside an aluminum fuel cell. They have been notified.
,,,,,,,your nuts by the way buddy,,,you kind of remind me of Trixie.
