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Chapter
Two: Stripping the car and prepping the body
Immediately
after the car came home, Chad began tearing into the car.
I never saw anyone tear into a car and start stripping it as
fast as he did.
In a matter of forty-five minutes, he had the seats, carpet,
and part of the dash out of the car.
The only thing stopping him was his Mom telling him it was
time for dinner.
The following day, he had the rest of the interior out of the
car, and pulled the existing wiring harness from the car.
In the end, we took four loads to the city dump or old FC
interior parts and miscellaneous other parts as well.
If anyone was looking for these parts, I'm sorry. They are
all now probably buried at the nearest landfill.
The
next step was to begin chipping out the sound proofing from the
interior of the car.
We took the advice of Paul Umholtz, who is also building a
purpose built 240sx and tried some dry ice.
What this does, is to simply freeze the tar like
undercoating, and chip away at it by using a chipping hammer that
welders use.
It still, took us about two days and 25 lbs. of dry ice, but
it was much neater than melted tar if we used a torch and scraper.
The
next step was to remove the tiny bits of tar left over after
chipping.
Our first thought was to use solvent, and a scotch-brite pad.
We quickly found that this idea would not work, as it never really
melted down the tar.
So, idea two was to use a 3-M Roloc pad, and angle grinder,
but this too was a bad idea as it quickly clogged the pad from being
of any use.
I found out however, that if you use a torch, heat it up, and
as it "almost" cools, you wire brush it off.
Also, at the same time, you could begin burning out the seam
caulking that needs to be removed, so we can stitch weld the seams
to make the car more rigid. It needs to have this removed, as a MIG
or spot welder cannot weld over the factory caulking.
Our
next step was to go into the engine bay, and remove the caulking
from there as well.
Same steps but in a different location.
I found, that using one of the large propane torches used for
starting hibachi's works well for all of the burning needs in this
project.
I got mine from GASPRO for relatively cheap, and when we are
done, we still can make our fires for the cookout after.
Okay,
after all the sound proofing and seam joint caulking is gone, you
now must grind away the paint to begin welding.
After we burned away the caulking, it seems the interior
paint is not as strong as the exterior paint, as it had burned away
with the caulking. Just
some minor grinding was needed to expose the bare metal.
There
are several chains of thought in seam welding.
The first is MIG welding (wire feed) every other inch or so.
The second, is using a spot welder, and going over every inch
of weld. Those who say
the first like that way because they feel that you can get a better
weld with the MIG. However,
those who like the latter, say that MIG puts too much heat into the
sheet metal and weakens it.
We chose to use a MIG, as it was the only thing we had
available to us.
The
MIG unit we got, was a HOBART 110-volt machine with .020 wire.
Straight argon was used as gas, as once again, it was all I
had access to. It took
us quite awhile to get the hang of using a MIG, as at SportCraft, we
use TIG process in 99% of all the jobs we do.
So, after a few burned holes in the sheet metal, things
started to look a lot better. Personally,
if I were to do this again, I'd go with a TIG, as I think I could
have done this faster with TIG since I am more accustomed to that
process of weld.
There
are several things you must have near by when you start a project
like this. One is a fire extinguisher, and the second is a fan to blow
out any of the smoke that builds up in a car.
Care must be taken with the fan, to make sure it does not
directly get into the area where is being welded, as it will blow
away the shielding gases.
We
started off in the back, and skipped back and forth between the
right and left sides, going forward.
We welded the seams on the floor to the rear sub frame, and
the sub frame to the wheel well and body.
Working our way forward, we went to the driver area, welding
the seams for the seat mounts, and floor pan to rocker panel.
Soon after, we went forward into the firewall, then into the
engine compartment. We debated about welding the underside, and got to whatever
we could, but did not get too carried away with it underneath.
After
we were done, we went over the whole car, to see if we missed any
spots, and checked for places we felt could use more welding.
The whole process took us two days, but the benefit of a
stiff chassis outweighs any time constraint.
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