Rear Seats Done, Right Side Frame Area

Just a quick note tonight, as the twins are keeping us busy and I don't have a lot of time:

The rear seats are done. I feel quite good about the result. The butt-weld seam isn't totally invisible, but almost. A bit of caulk on the outside (exterior) seam and it will be nearly perfect. I did get the curvature correct, and after the car is upholstered, you will never know that these were replaced. The replacement metal is a lot more solid than what I removed from the car, a definite improvement.

I was busy with the twins for much of this week, but yesterday I devoted several hours to repairing the wiring harness. In addition to a few additional places in both the back and front portions of the harness that had melted on the outer sheathing because of welding on adjacent panels, the shrink-wrap tubing that covers the majority of the harness seems to have become brittle with time. In a number of places, where the harness had kinks and bends, the tubing had cracked. I removed the bad portions of the shrink-wrap tubing and recovered things with a thick layer of electrical tape. New shrink-wrap tubing would have been better, but I didn't have any with the correct, large diameter available. In the two or three places where the harness had been damaged a bit more, I made sure the wires were intact before taping up the individual wires and then taping the bundle. The complete product is not as good as new, but it is good and I will test everything for shorts upon installation.

Replacement harnesses cost over one thousand dollars, and I imagine installing them is quite difficult because of the awkward angles and narrow spaces it has to fit through.

Today I worked on the right rear frame section beneath the rear torsion bar. It was a bit more rotten than the left side. Originally I intended to use a reproduction stamping to patch this area, from Stoddard, but I found out that the stamping covered a portion of the frame that for me, was in good shape! The rotten parts don't have replacement metal readily available. Therefore, like on the left side, I was forced to fabricate pretty much all the patches. Because I lack a good metal brake, I had to do a lot of pounding on little patches in the vise, and build things up in sections. The heater tube section where the tube enters the body at the rear had quite a few holes.

The right solution would have been to cut the majority of the rear heater tube section completely out of the frame, and then to patch or replace it off the car. Easier said than done. I thought about doing that for about an hour, and even started to cut it out. The angles are just too difficult. I was about to get in over my head with the amount of frame that would require cutting just to remove the tube, and I reversed courses of action, deciding that patches were a better idea. In the end, I think I sealed up 95% of the leaks in the pipe, and then I slathered everything in zinc-rich primer. Then, I started rebuilding the frame section, and I completed about 80% of that today. It doesn't look very pretty, but it is a good approximation of what was there before, and I hope that it contributes to the strength of the car in this area. I used thicker sheet metal for the patches than I have used elsewhere in the car.

New tool from eBay: Ingersoll-Rand IR302 die grinder. This is their top-of-the-line model that should just about power through everything without stalling. New, they are well over $100. I got mine for about $30 lightly used. Not bad! I also ordered a Home Depot Husky Pro 3/8 impact wrench, model H4103. This tool is made by Florida Pneumatic, who makes a number of professional OEM lines of tools, and it delivers XXX ft lbs. of torque. A nice tool, I hope. I plan on using it with a impact-driven stud remover I got to get out the broken exhaust stud in the head of the 356 C engine I have.

Posted by pbrown at June 11, 2004 09:17 PM