First job once home is to work on splitting the fenders.

Laying out some of the electrical components.





Hook for winching the car in and out of the trailer.















G-meter mount.

Weight bar tabs.





Procrastinating about starting on building headers so I took a detour and started some stainless brake line bending.

Header building. can't put it off any longer. This will be only the second set I've ever built and my first time doing stainless.

Time for the other side.

Now lets try to not ruin all this expensive material when welding it. Turn that back purge on...

Beautiful work, those welds are sick. Your craftsmanship is top shelf. It's going to work as good as it looks..

quote:

Originally posted by DragRaceResults:
Pretty bad looking little hot rod! Thanks for sharing!

Lots more to come. lol

quote:

Originally posted by Mike English:
Man, sweet ride!!!

Thanks Mike.

Next up is more stainless brake lines.

As I have gotten older I can really appreciate tig porn. In my metal trade I learned in the old days with a stick rod and then a mig was like magic but I have never gotten the hang of tig. Going to give it another try this winter. Beautiful work

Front suspension limiters.



Doing some mockup of the front layout.



Header collector support rods.



Fuel cell mounted.





Ron Davis didn't have the radiator I wanted in stock with -16 bungs. It would have been a couple months wait so I got one with 1 1/4" nipples and swapped the fittings. Nothing like cutting up a new $1000 radiator. lol

Fuel system packaging got tricky with a lack of space. Had to get a little creative.











This is kinda trick. Saved alot of space. A pre-pump filter that fits inside the fuel cell.

Trans overflow.





The car was getting close to having most of the fabrication done so I threw it on the scales quick to get a rough idea where the weight would wind up.











No Driver


With Driver

Decided to get a little creative on the chute mount. It's a Jerry Bickel/Simpson spring launch chute I was able to salvage off the Malibu. Just had to straighten out the aluminum can with some hammer & dolly work.

Wanted to try something different than the normal small round tube mounting.

quote:

Originally posted by Little Chief:
As I have gotten older I can really appreciate tig porn. In my metal trade I learned in the old days with a stick rod and then a mig was like magic but I have never gotten the hang of tig. Going to give it another try this winter. Beautiful work

I remember many years ago watching the bike builder shows on TV and seeing those guys tig welding ans thought I'd like to try it myself. I wound up buying a Lincoln Squarewave 175 Pro tig welder and just sat down and practiced. Read what stuff I could find to learn. Once I started to work for the chassis shop I would take scraps and notch them and take them home to practice. I'd come back in the next day and show them to the boss and he'd make suggestions to try and I'd repeat the cycle. After a couple months he must have felt I was good enough to tig weld on customers cars and off I go.

I'll admit I struggle on A/C aluminum welding. I don't do it very often and have to learn all over again each time. Hard to get good at it if you don't do it all the time like I do with chromoly DC welding every day.

Fabbed up a rolling cart to transport the body to powder coat and eventually to the body shop.







Tear down time to prepare for powder coating.











Roof skin cut off to be replaced with carbon fiber later.



All sanded clean.

Loading up for powder coating.

A week later the powder coating was done.

Off to the body shop. Good customers of mine at the shop, two brothers own a body shop that specializes in Porsche's and high end European cars. They agreed to paint the car for me. The hard part for me is I controlled the time line of the build up to this point.

Oh and for anyone who might be wondering, the fabrication time to get to this point is 1200 man hours!

The car was dropped off for paint almost exactly to the day, one yer from my crash in the old Malibu. So for one person doing all the fab work alone (after hours and weekends), 1 year fabrication time wasn't too bad. Sadly, things will slow from here on out.





House became a mess with the car blown apart in pieces.















While the car was away I had to take time to sand all of the aluminum parts to be anodized. Alot of hours and sore fingers. You have to sand to the finish you want as what ever the surface looks like will show through the anodizing color.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Fabman,