Exterior Patching in Work

Got my spindles with new kingpins back from the machine shop and I don’t feel so bad that I couldn’t get them apart. They too had a devil of a time if all the tooling marks visible by the lock pins are any indication. That and the bill! Good thing I won’t live long enough to see this set wear out and have to go through that again.

The driver's side front quarter panel patch is in.

 

I rolled the car outside again to grind welds and prime the driver’s side repairs, and to cut out the lower quarter on the passenger side. There was quite a bit of hidden rust that will require additional custom-formed parts to repair the hidden panels, but since the afternoons are now too hot to work long hours, progress will be slow. I’ll be spending more time designing the custom interior until the weather moderates.

 

Speaking of…after a fruitless search for square or rectangular thinwall stainless steel tubing to make the pushbutton shells, I had to settle for brass. I really would have preferred stainless to more closely match the OEM parts, but if the brass turns out to be a light color, it should match the Fury gold parts okay. They notified me today that the brass tubing has been shipped.

I also couldn’t get green ½” Plexiglass in small quantities, so had to settle for clear Lexan. I’ll have to experiment with green lighting to see if I can approximate the original parts, but if not, I guess it’s not a big deal.

I’m still working the gold anodized side trim problem, but the anodizing shop has yet to come up with an estimate, and since the original pattern isn’t available in a roll wider than 7 3/4” I’ll have to make a decision on a substitute pattern. With my planned modification, 9” would be perfect, but anything narrower would probably look wrong.

And there is another tool glitch to make my day. Something is amiss with my welder, and it’s becoming difficult to make good welds, even with all new metal. It sputters and sometimes fails to start cleanly.  The manual and an Internet search point toward a bad connection, but everything is clean and tight, and the cables aren’t damaged, and changing settings doesn’t help, so that’s one more opportunity.