#281
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Oh, and the metal rot in the chassis. Well having an all aluminum chassis should help there too
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Joel Heinke Be original; don't be afraid of being bold! |
#282
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Quote:
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Joel Heinke Be original; don't be afraid of being bold! |
#283
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Door frames (cont.)
The next step in building out the lower door sills was to add a support and closure plate at the chassis edge. The two fold purpose of this plate is to provide a wind/moisture seal for under the doors and secondly to provide support for the door sill and for the rocker panel sub-structure that extends out approximately 4” from the chassis edge.
Similar to the chassis, the panel will be ¼” thick 5052 aluminum and I decided to bond/glue it in place. It didn’t feel adequate to just rely on a ¼” glue surface around the plate edge so I decided to use a combination of ¾” and ½” square tube as backing members to provide more gluing surface area. Given the two-part methacrylate adhesive only has a 15 minute working time, I decided to approach the gluing as a 2 step process: 1) glue square tube backing members, and then 2) glue in ¼” plate. Here all preparation is complete for gluing step 1. I went as far as doing a dry run for clamping all the backing members in place so I’d ensure I had adequate number of clamps ready at hand. I also cut a ¼”square off end of paint stir stick to give me a foolproof tool for positioning backing members a consistent ¼” from edge during gluing and clamping. Step 1 complete for both sides of chassis with glue applied and everything clamped in place. For step 2, I decided to use pop rivets for clamps given I don’t have many “deep reach” clamps. The preparation of drilling and deburring all the pop rivet holes took more time than the actual gluing. Here it is with these panels all glued in place. I now have a very solid foundation for the door sills and in addition have added considerable stiffness at the chassis edge.
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Joel Heinke Be original; don't be afraid of being bold! |
#284
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Learning stuff here Joel. Your build is a whole 'nother approach to the typical hot rodder. I'm still trying to get my head around structural adhesives instead of welding.
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Kerry Pinkerton |
#285
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Used more and more with the newer metal compositions that don't take kindly to the heat from a few spot welds Kinda strange to think about you car being glued together as your driving down the freeway
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Dave Bradbury |
#286
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Kerry: you're right about different approach. Being mostly an old school car guy myself, for this project I have to constantly challenge myself to think outside the traditional fabrication ways and ask if there's a newer/better way to do it. Sometimes I think there is and sometimes I just break out the welder and join things that way. I guess time will tell if I'm making optimal choices.
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Joel Heinke Be original; don't be afraid of being bold! |
#287
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Door frames (cont.)
My initial thought was to have the lower door sills stop at the chassis edge. That’s how I made the mockup pieces assuming the top of the rocker panels would extend inward and join there. But upon further reflection, it became apparent to me this would be a non-optimal design. It would result in much harder to make rocker panels that would have a visible seam right in the middle of the door sills. In addition, it would make it harder to build in any sort of horizontal adjustment for the rocker panels so they could be aligned with the lower fenders and door edges.
I decide a better design is to extend the door sills all the way out and step them under the rocker panel edges. This would give a nice, clean door sill where the seam would fall into the natural place for the paint color change. It’s traditional for the Miura rocker panels to be a different color than the rest of the car. Given this revised design, I needed to determine exactly where in vertical and horizontal planes the rocker panels would be placed. As Mark (Superleggera) has previously predicted, I needed to turn to the body panel “source of truth”, the station buck. My Miura station buck consists of multiple modules; one of these modules contains just the rocker panels. I spent a day assembling and fine tuning this module in order to obtain the needed measurements. I’m really fortunate to have done this. Prior, I had assumed the rocker panels ran parallel to the chassis centerline and horizontal to the ground. In fact, there’s a slight outward taper on the rocker panel top edge and a slight upward incline from front to back. Its subtle details like this that are easy to miss but are very important in achieving the “wow factor” for the final look of the car. Armed with this measurement information, I started fabricating an inner sub-structure that would serve as the rocker panel mount. These sub-structures will take some time to fabricate as they run the full length between front and rear tires and will need bracing triangulation as I anticipate they will be sat upon as people enter/exit the cockpit.
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Joel Heinke Be original; don't be afraid of being bold! |
#288
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Years ago I purchased a Raleigh bicycle assembled with structural adhesive. When I enquired about the strength, the shop owner brought out a similar frame which had been mangled when it was run over by a DC Metro Bus (the rider bailed and was unharmed). The frame was a mess, but all the glued joints were fine.
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You ever wonder what medieval cook looked at the guts of a pig and thought, "I bet if you washed out that poop tube, you could stuff it with meat and eat it." |
#289
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Door frames (cont.)
The rocker sub-structure for the drivers side is now complete.
The sub-structure is fabricated in a more traditional fashion using pieces of aluminum tubing welded together and then attached to the chassis via bolts. I’ll build the rocker sub-structure for the passenger side while the process is fresh in my mind prior to starting on the door jambs.
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Joel Heinke Be original; don't be afraid of being bold! |
#290
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Door Jambs
I thought I had it worked out that I could make the sheet aluminum bends needed for the door sills on the break I have in my garage. Well it turns out I can make the necessary bends but not at the 38” length needed for the door sills and lower door frames. So after looking around, I found a small sheet metal shop that made the bends for me without a long schedule delay.
So the easy part is the door sill where it’s long and straight. The sheet as folded at the sheet metal shop lays nice and flat on the newly constructed sub-structure. The hard part is where it turns upward to form the door jamb at the front and rear. I decided to do a rounded corner at the front for better weather-strip sealing instead of a square corner. On the second try I was able to make a nice curved channel piece with linear stretching dies on a TM Tech style power hammer. Well it all gets more complicated from here as there are no more long straight stretches for the weather-strip channel.
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Joel Heinke Be original; don't be afraid of being bold! |
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