Yes, and it's good to be home. Now it's getting adjusted to the time again, old age! We had a great time.
I'm really glad this is working out, sometimes it can go the other way if you don't have the right guy :eek:
Ken
Printable View
Yes, and it's good to be home. Now it's getting adjusted to the time again, old age! We had a great time.
I'm really glad this is working out, sometimes it can go the other way if you don't have the right guy :eek:
Ken
Wow! That looks super nice. I bet Dan is going to be pleased. Your going to have to wear sunglasses driving behind him from the glare! I'm convinced now that I'll at least have the rear drums coated, and if I have to do any work on the differential, then I'll have it done to. :cool:
P.S. nice pic Ken!
That's ONE BIG CAT you have there! :D Looks like your family had a great time.
Well, time to go pick up the frame. :D Pictures to follow. :D:D
Don
Don - you'll be happy with that powder coating regardless of the naysayers here and elsewhere. Mine, while it does have some orange peel, is head and shoulders above my original paint (and that was also a good job). I had to add a bolt on bracket and found that the coating is even somewhat difficult to start a new and sharp drill bit. I only wish that I had taken a few more close up photos of the completed chassis.
Ken, nice to see that you made it back from Oz and Kiwi land:D(I like your furry friend)
Those parts look very nice!:toocool:
Glad to see you'll be going together for the last time. I've been looking forward to seeing this one finished. I know it's going to be very cool! (already is for that matter)
I have to agree with you about not painting any more parts. The few I had done sold me on powder coating, especially on driver.
Mike
Dave and Mike,I'm like you guys............I think this stuff is great. An hour after it came out of the oven we were hauling it home and could handle it right away. With paint you have to be careful for a long time till it really dries, which can take days or weeks to get really hard.
We pulled an all nighter last night, worked until 4 am. The frame came out really nice, and the coating got into every little spot. Got the rear axle assembled as far as bolting the pumpkin in and getting it mounted to the frame with the fourbar setup. What took a lot of time was the fact we let them powder coat everything, letting the coating flow into every hole. So we had to use a dremel to open up each one so the bolts would go back through. I wanted to simply run a drill bit through them, but Dan didn't want to chip any more coating away than was needed. It was time consuming, but we finally got the bolts in and put antisieze on the entire bolt. Since he is using stainess bolts everywhere we didn't want them galling for future removal.
I didn't take any pictures yet. Because it is his car I figured I would let him post his pictures on his forum before I did it here. Don't want to take away his fun. But tomorrow we are going to hit on it again and try to get the front end installed, and he will be posting some pictures then, so it is fair game for me to do so too. :D
Oh, BTW, I needed to pickup a simple 9 inch Ford housing to center section gasket and 10 of the little copper washers so we could install his pumpkin. First I went to Advanced Auto and got a blank stare from the kid behind the counter............got the usual "What make, model, does it have A/C, what color upholstery?" routine. He got his Manager, who was about a year older, to help, still no luck. So I went to the local Ford dealer. Parts guy says "We haven't carried those in 26 years!" Next I went to NAPA and they didn't have them but one of their stores about 15 miles away did, so I went there and got them. I felt like I was working on some rare antique or something. Even the local speed shop didn't have any. :confused:
Don
Don,
Glad to hear it came out good. Started to worry a little when you didn't post last night. Old mother hen here :LOL: Looking forward to pics :D
Ken
Yeah Ken, I just rolled out of bed! :LOL: By the time we ate our "dinner" from the all night McDonalds, it was 5 am, and I crashed. I can't wait till he gives me the ok to post my own pictures............I caught h*** the last time I beat him to the punch. :o:LOL::LOL:
Don
Don - sounds like fun. I just wish that we had weather good enough so I could at least get out in my garage shop to work on some of my punch list items before the upholsterer gets it back. It has been cold enough that my 2 propane heaters barely make a dent in the temperature. The car was in the basement shop before this winter so some progress was made during the dog days of winter. Oh well, we're taking a week in the Orlando area to warm up and celebrate my wife's early retirement and pray for a thaw:D.
Those @#$% crush washers - no one locally here had them and I ended up mail ordering from Currie. Even those seem too hard and wouldn't seal the stud threads even with some extra "torquing" on the nuts and drooled gear oil so I ended up using some high temp silicone on the threads as well.
Don, when I was driving stock cars a few years back, we were running two tracks which necessitated changing the chunk in our Ford 9-inch sometimes twice a week. We never used a gasket; we just used high-temp RTV silicone, the copper-colored stuff. Never had a leak and never had a problem...:3dSMILE:
As an alternative, one time back when I was kid, I watched my dad make a gasket for a differential from a brown paper bag. He used the chunk that had been removed and "cut" the new gasket by holding the brown paper in place and tapping the edges with a ball-peen hammer. I've never forgotten that trick... If you can't find a gasket locally and Dan doesn't want to just use RTV, you can make a perfect fitting gasket using the above method. If Dan isn't happy with brown paper, he can get some sheet gasket material at the parts store. (Gotta be pretty thin for the diff, though...):HMMM:
That powder coat looks 1,000 times better than what is on my frame. I with others forward to the "roller pic's". I started following Dan's build on the other board. Admire his fab skills.
Earl
Jim, for a while I considered just using rtv, but luckily NAPA had a gasket and washers at the one location. That gasket is about as thin as a paper bag! Years ago I used stuff like a Quakers Oats box to make gaskets, so the paper bag trick would probably work too.
Earl, thanks. The job the coater did was really better than expected. It is a frame after all, and never will be as smooth as a body, but it is very good.
Plan for today is to get more stuff bolted on. :D
Don
looks great!
glad everything worked out for you
cant wait to see that chassis assembled, and in color
You and I are playing thread tag! :LOL::LOL:
Don
Ok, got a little of the rear end assembled today. Didn't get a whole lot done as we had to quit early, but here are some shots of where we ended up.
Don
And a couple more........
Don
Verry cool :D
Don you have more pics then Dan so I am going to watch you putting this back together . Frame does look great .
Very nice work and the powder came out sweet... You guys have some serious skills without a doubt! http://www.tbucketeers.com/forum/ima...s/thumbsup.gif
that frame shines. What a nice contrast to the chrome 4 bar suspension. You guys do nice work!:cool:
Thanks guys. It feels so good to see this thing finally going together for the last time (hopefully :)). Still a lot to do, but this is a major step for sure.
Don
Won't be long you will have a rolling chassie, look's great.
BradC
Wow!! Looks great from the pics don, glad to see Dan moving forward. I cant wait to see it in person.
Thank you. Tonight we got a few more hours in and got the front axle and radius rods installed. It was like Christmas, opening boxes of chrome goodies, kinda brings out the kid in you. :D Still a lot more to do, but maybe a few more nights will have it rolling around.
Only bad spot was that a jackstand collapsed and crushed the end of one of my fingers. :eek: Right now it is about twice the size of the others, but that is the price the hot rod Gods demand every so often. Surprisingly, it doesn't hurt too bad.........YET. But I think when the swelling goes down it might be a different story.
Here are some pictures of what we got done tonight.
Don
Look on the bright side...........you'll heal. If you'd damaged the hardware, pc or chrome that would have been a tragedy!Quote:
Originally Posted by Itoldyouso
:D
Yeah, he makes me wear gloves when we work on it. :LOL::LOL: That's probably what kept my finger from getting damaged worse.:)
Don
The hard work and long hours are really showing at this point. I have to agree with a few others that it will be ashame putting on body on this frame!
I was going to tell this story on the thread about elbow injuries but there is already a lot of pain there. To make it short, instead of drilling a toe/finger nail to relieve pressure, at the risk of further injury from the drill, just straighten out a paper clip and heat the end with a clean flame and the hot wire will MELT a hole through the nail and relieve the pressure. It worked for me! The powder coat looks terrific!
Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder
Wow,,,, Don,, Can you get a close up of the 4-Bar brackets. That's really Cool.
Don, what no picture of the damaged finger.......LOL
Has Dan settled on color for the body?
Bradc
I did take a picture of my finger so I can sue Dan, but he said he has no money left.........he spent it all on his car. :LOL:
Don, I tried the hot paperclip trick last night, but chickened out when it started going through the nail. I will have to do it again tonight after a couple of beers. :)
Onemintcaddy, I'll post up some pictures of the fourbar setup tonight after I get home for you.
Don
Onemintcaddy, I don't have all of the pictures I once had, I just had to buy a new computer and all my pictures are locked up in the old one. :( But here are some that I do have. Essentially it is an Autoweld setup that was designed for drag car applications, but modified by us to fit this setup. He's using it with a 9 inch Ford rear and a set of Posies superslide quarter eliptic springs. Hope these help.
BTW, those 3 "rivets" you see in each of the four bar frame mounts are not really holding anything. He drilled and tapped button head screws into those holes to simulate the rivets Ford used to hold mounts to the frame. Just to give it a little different look.
Don
I have never been a fan of the half spring suspensions. But Dan's sure looks sharp and even appear to be very functional as well. You guys have some engineering smarts in ya.
Thanks Ricko. I think this setup should ride pretty well. The combination of quarter eliptics in the back and a single Superslide in the front should plant the tires pretty well. Plus, this car is not going to be a featherweight, Dan overbuilds his stuff, and four grown men had trouble carrying the bare frame out of the body shop. They kept asking "how much does this d*** thing weigh?" :LOL: Good thing he put that 455 in there to move it around.
Don
Hey Don if your old computer is windows xp and your new one is Vista, there is a cheap cable transfer device made by Belkin that will let you transfer all your old stuff that you want to keep to the new one. It is quick and super easy to use. Steve.
Thanks Steve. What happened was that some virus got in and locked it up, it would take like hours to go from one screen to another. If I came to this forum for example and clicked on a thread, it could be hours before that thread came up. I finally called the Geek Squad, and they said the harddrive was so bad they refunded my $ 199.00 because we couldn't even get on the internet so they could take control of it to fix it. So I just bought a new one. Some day when I have a lot of time I will hook up the old one and put some discs in to capture my pictures at least, but it will be a long slow process.
The old computer was maybe 6 years old, so it was no sin to scrap it.
Don
Hay Don,, Thats what I was interested in is the brackets,,,,, Where they tig-welded all the way around? I like that stainless,,, Nice touch.
To bad on your computer,,, I needed to get a different one also. Then I found out my camera wouldn't work with this one. Looked at my wife and she said,, OK,, you can get a new one. I still have a bunch of photos on that thing of my frame build. Some Day.
Awesome stuff, Don! Every car mag out there is going to want to feature this when it's done.
Don- I don't know if this helps or not, but once my computer crashed and I was able to just buy a new hard drive for the computer so I bought an external hard drive also so that I could put the old drive in there to recover my documents. I ended up removing all the operating software from the old hard drive and now I use it as extra space for music and pictures. You said the hard drive was bad though so I'm not sure your case is exactly the same.
I'm glad to see things moving along on the rpu. any progress on your dodge or is there no time in this stage of Dan's build bolting on shiny parts where he wants to work alone? :LOL:
Any updates Don, or has he decided to start over........LOL
BradC