|
|
Post by jharfst on Mar 2, 2008 23:31:44 GMT -5
After getting new front seats for Christmas, I was inspired to take care of some bodywork issues since the floorpans under the old ones were nasty. While trying to resist the urge to tackle too much at once, here is where I have gotten so far. Rockers were totally shot. To keep frm buying new panels, I built some rock sliders out of some diamond plate and tube from the scrap yard and permanently attached them.  Driver's side under seat floor pan replaced with new panel.  Pulled the rear seat and floor mat and found more rust. Surprise! Still some work to do in the rear...    Had the fender mount roll bar(can ya tell?), gonna replace with the later CJ floor mount roll bar. Got two new inner fenderwells and rear floor pan so fixin to gut and replace all this. Tried to just weld in patches and gave up. Plan is to Herculine the interior, try out my painting skills with the Duplicolor Paintshop lacquer based system on the outside and POR15 the sliders. We'll see how it turns out. |
|
|
|
Post by rsmith on Mar 3, 2008 1:46:06 GMT -5
Wow Jim! I feel bad buying your old seats and causing you to open a can of cheese.  I like the tapered slider bars you made. I am curious how you did that. |
|
|
|
Post by jharfst on Mar 3, 2008 15:59:30 GMT -5
Wow Jim! I feel bad buying your old seats and causing you to open a can of cheese. I like the tapered slider bars you made. I am curious how you did that. It is a project long overdue. The bondo from the last patch attempt wasn't holding anymore. For the sliders, I took a piece of tube and cut a line all the way down from end to end, rotated 90 degrees and cut another one so I had a quarter section cut out of it all the way down. I welded it on the corner of the two pieces of diamond plate, (there's a horizontal piece underneath), but left four inches unwelded from each end. I cut some V shaped notches in the remaining four inches and just "squished" them down to a point and welded it all up. Ground it all smooth and voila. |
|
|
|
Post by Wolfy317 on Mar 3, 2008 21:03:13 GMT -5
Man I have got to do that to my front floorpan. .......
|
|
|
|
Post by jharfst on Apr 2, 2008 7:55:26 GMT -5
|
|
|
|
Post by jeepchipjones on Apr 2, 2008 14:35:35 GMT -5
thank you for saving that jeep, most would have just took it to the crusher. rockers look good! lot of work ahead of you, but well worth it
|
|
|
|
Post by jharfst on Apr 20, 2008 22:04:45 GMT -5
New rear tins are in:  Not the prettiest or straightest, but at least it's all metal now. Gonna make some roll bar brackets and mounting plates this week. Gonna feel nice welding on something other than rusted sheetmetal. |
|
|
|
Post by broncocraigellis on Apr 20, 2008 23:05:20 GMT -5
Looks great! It helps me weld better to hit those replacement panels with a flap disc to remove the coating.
|
|
|
|
Post by jharfst on Apr 21, 2008 23:55:37 GMT -5
Hmmm, Hadn't thought of that. My biggest problem is that molten metal is affected by gravity. Even with the heat turned all the way down, I still get burn-through. The guy who owns the mig I'm borrowing (Millermatic 130) runs pure CO2 as a shielding gas. From what I have read, that increases penetration over an Argon/CO2 mix, which may be too much. I have a feeling that a mixed gas would do better on sheetmetal, but it sure seems to work great for thicker metal.
-jim
|
|
|
|
Post by jeepchipjones on Apr 22, 2008 0:22:51 GMT -5
I prefer to use a 110V mig on sheet metal.
|
|
|
|
Post by rccolacc on Apr 22, 2008 9:48:04 GMT -5
The new metal looks nice.
Are you just spot welding, or running beads? With the welder turned down it shouldn't burn through with just spot welds... I used Mark Guyton's Lincoln 140C to weld some exhaust, and I used the 3rd setting (out of 4) to weld some pretty thin tube. The 1st setting was only like 20amps I think.
You're right about a mixed gas being a cooler weld though. We switched from argon/CO2 mix to just straight CO2 on a tig at school and you could really notice a difference.
-RC
|
|
|
|
Post by rccolacc on Apr 22, 2008 9:52:23 GMT -5
Edit: I just looked at the pictures again, and it looks like there's mostly spot welds on the metal. Maybe try smaller spot welds? Small tack welds?
|
|
|
|
Post by jharfst on Apr 22, 2008 22:55:48 GMT -5
I did a little of both spots and beads. The spot welds didn't burn much but seemed like I needed more heat on them. Most of my problem was that the outer panels are a patchwork of pieces grafted in the rust holes of the original panels. It was pretty bad rusted in places but the budget didn't allow for me to replace everything. Ran across some previous repairs that weren't straight which accounted for panels not lining up right, etc. For what it's gonna be used for, it'll be fine.
|
|
|
|
Post by jharfst on Nov 9, 2008 21:32:27 GMT -5
OK. Finally got all my exterior body panels replaced/repaired and started looking at paint options. Found this web site: www.paintforcars.com that has a single stage Acrylic urethane paint pretty reasonable. Only catch is that the color selection is limited. No one in my family likes yellow, eventhough I thought it was different, so I thought about changing to a nice bright red. In the mean time, I took all the body panels down to bare metal and sprayed a coat of POR-15 to stave off the rust that had begun creeping through the various coats of primer until I could finish the bodywork and apply a finish coat. Now I'm looking at it and really liking black. It's definitely better than the former yellow. I've owned black cars before and know what a pain it is to keep them clean but I still like the look of em when they are. Opinions?  |
|
|
|
Post by rccolacc on Nov 10, 2008 8:25:31 GMT -5
I hear you about black vehicles being a pain to keep clean. I like the CJ black though. You gonna still call it swiss cheese now that it's black?
Looks good.
-RC
|
|
