Project Theseus

[colinc]

Thanks Noll re: gauge of metal, that is very helpful. I promise I will drop this after this post.

I sometimes put a jack stand there towards the outside, but that's not a balance point if you only want to jack in one spot.

So you would be comfortable putting a floor jack there to lift one side of the car?

[Ont240]

No, Only a jack stand 1 of 4.
I always jack from the diff and front engine cross member. Even with the spook on the front my jack will go in from the side ahead of the wheel behind the spoiler, or like you said drive it onto 2x6 blocks at the front. The factory jack point is the lip of the sill below the front door post or under the rear dog leg where there is multiple layers. The slot in the factory jack fit thos areas.

[zedfoot]

As long as you use a block of wood with a notch to distribute the load. Yesterday I helped my neighbour jack up his 85 Grand Am. He had never done so himself, but the lip was crunched everywhere from "professionals" jacking it up over the years.

[Noll]

More misc. stuff today, picking away at stuff slowly.

Welded up the inner/outer wheelarch joins on both sides, and cleaned up all the welds on the easy-to-get-at passenger side. It's still far from the prettiest part of the car, but ehh. Next up will be to fix some more stuff in the wheelarch then on to the dogleg re-do.

[Noll]

Bunch more wheelarch stuff done. Made a patch for the gaping hole at the top of the arch:




Not an invisible patch, but this inner arch is so far beyond that I didn't think there was a point.




On to the front section repair. Some misc stuff fixed to have a good baseline to work from:




The new flange welded on:






And made/welded on the top layer:





With that complete, on to the dogleg re-do. Made a replacement panel, then cut the old section off. I plan to cut the entire bottom flange off and re-make it in the correct spot.




Replacement dogleg is made out of my old hatch skin (the original hatch that was rear-ended), amusing that it will live on in some small part in the car.

[Noll]

Nothing major today, just painted a bunch of stuff black after cleaning off surface rust (or in the case of the grille, overspray).

[Noll]

Also slotted the holes in my wilwood 1" mc to fit, and mounted it up/adjusted the pushrod.
Interestingly even with the old MC the pushrod was adjusted 4mm too short, so the last time this car moved under its own power the brakes wouldn't have been great. I think the old mc is an early 70/71 one (by the large nuts on the outputs), so might have been swapped in after the stock one went but they never adjusted anything?



Will need to take it apart again to polish up the spacer, then this part of the brakes is done.

[Noll]

Back at the welding, it never ends. Cut the bottom flange off the bent portion of the rocker, and made a new one. Had some 14ga lying around, so used that as there's no harm in making stuff stronger in this area.




Finished boxing it all in and doing some misc patchwork/cleanup work:




Some minor hammerwork required but it's dead straight relative to the rest of the rocker now, so I am happy.




The new dogleg nearly complete, this and one last patch for the inner wheelarch and this section of the car is complete.

[Noll]

Was going to take a break from the Z today, but as often happens I ended up in the garage anyway. Didn't do any major work, just welded on a section to fix the end of the drip rail.

[Dr.Diesel]

You should have a great sense of accomplishment with were you are today with this project. You have brought this car light years ahead of where it was when you started. I have to give you credit. This is no small undertaking. I look forward to your updates. The car is looking great.

[Noll]

You should have a great sense of accomplishment with were you are today with this project. You have brought this car light years ahead of where it was when you started. I have to give you credit. This is no small undertaking. I look forward to your updates. The car is looking great.

Many thanks! It's not perfect by any means, but it'll hit the road again which is more than can be said about the likely outlook before I started .

----------------------

Got quite a lot done today. Finished making the new dogleg panel and welded it on:










As you can see I decided to weld up the leading edge of the dogleg to eliminate the visual seam between the two parts. I know there are those who will (and fairly enough) say that deleting seams like this makes it look like the rocker was built out of bondo/some other issue, but I wanted to clean stuff up a bit and I never plan to sell this thing so it's a moot point. Plus, even if it got sold at some point for some reason I have pics of the underlying structure to show that all is well .


Next up, yet another rusty subframe section. I had initially thought that this was just surface flakiness, but some investigation with a hammer showed that that wasn't the case.




Cut out the affected section:




Floor had some pinholes too so made a new section and welded it in. Still some more weld cleanup to do.




And started making a new section of rail. Will use the bit of tubing lying to the left to recreate the vapor hose passthrough in the rail, dunno where it came from bit it's the right diameter so that's nice.

[Noll]

With the work pictured below, I've hit a pretty big milestone. To the best of my knowledge, barring some misc. stuff like brackets and bolts snapped off in holes, all rust repair is complete for the chassis. There's still more work to do as far as the aforementioned misc. stuff and more bracing/reinforcement, but the time of cutting big chunks out of the car to replace with new/homemade sections is DONE. Only took ~4 years .



Finished making the replacement subframe section and welded it on:






Didn't aim to make the join seamless, leaving a bit more meat on the welds to ensure strength was more important here IMO, it'll be hidden by the fuel tank etc anyway.




Moved onto the very last subframe section, this area which had rusted through from the inside. Cut out, cleaned up (not pictured), and welded in a new panel from 14ga.









I then finished scraping the undercoating out of the trans tunnel, all remaining undercoating now will be dealt with when I flip the car the other way.

[Noll]

Whole bunch of misc. stuff and bracket replacement today.

Cut this off from just behind the diff retaining strap mounts; not sure what It's for but I'm assuming possibly exhaust hanger mount? Ground the old captive nut off and welded in a new one, then welded it back on.









Next up, this rusted bracket:






Took this one off to as there was some rust jacking underneath, and ended up making a new one.






Temporarily took the fuel tank strap bracket off to hammer it flat again as it was pretty mangled. Doesn't really show how bad it was in the pic.






The rear brake/fuel line bracket was toast, so I decided to grind it off and replace it with a captive nut. Will be using that to install a bracket of my own design here.







On to the front end, welded in some more captive nuts to the upper rad support (for possible future intercooler mounting), asd well as a couple of wire harness holders:






The last thing I did for the day was basically just a bit of insurance. As the rear valence is 3 panels welded together it'll need a bit of filler, and I don't want air going under the car at higher speeds and possibly flexing the rear valence, causing cracking. As such, welded in a 16ga strip in the most 'oil-canny' bit in the middle, stiffened it up a lot.

[zedfoot]

I think you meant front valence?

[Noll]

I think you meant front valence?

Nope, in my case I welded the rear valence together from 3 different bits - middle 1/3 is from a 280z as are the taillight surrounds above, outer thirds are from a 240z to match up with the 240z bumper mounts that I put on when I replaced the rear subframe sections months back).

Of course the front is also 3 bolted sections, but shouldn't need to do anything to that other than drill some holes in it for the front spook I'll be running.