Shakedown

so we've been working hard on the car all weekend, and today, we were finally able to take the car on our first shakedown run.

New tool! A pipe bender!

SO i picked up a pipe bender over the weekend. I went to McKenzie Steel in Ft. Lauderdale and bought some flat 1/4 bar and some steel tubing for my next project. Can you guess what it is?

Front fenders installed and textured.

We were able to install both front fenders, because we are starting to run low on time, we realized that we would not be able to finish the fenders how we originally planned, so after some creative thinking by Jimmy, we sprayed them with some undercoating. This will hide some of the imperfections.
I'm not 100% convinced that I like it yet, but its all that our time constraints will allow.

We were able to get the Rear driver's side mounted. It needs some smoothing, and a few coats of the undercoating.

More weight reduction and FG work

Because we've taken the weight reduction so seriously in other aspects of the car, we decided to do the same with the doors. While I was on Vacation Jimmy was hard at work. He completely cut out the inner panels, saving about 5-7 lbs.




While I was away he also painted all 4 of our basset wheels flat black.



Our next step before permanently mounting the FG panels is to make room for our new wheels. In order for them not to rub I had to cut into our steel 1/4 panels. I cut out a 2" strip off the top side of the wheel well.

At this stage, using my hammer and dolly I joined the inner and outer sheet metal you see pictured below. I then used my welder to re-join the two panels. It was a long arduous process, but it came out perfect. Unfortunately I don't have pictures to show. Jimmy then slathered the welded areas with some caulking, and our next step will be mounting the fenders.


The Fronts have turned out great. We still need to permanently mount the rear portions of the fenders, but these pictures show how the fenders have turned out.

Fiberglass Mock up

Well, we finished the first steps of making our wide body fenders. In the following pics, we are trying to get an idea of how things are gong to look, and how far out we need to go to cover our new wheel/tire combo.

Well, I've been slacking a bit on the posting front, but that doesn't mean we haven't been up to much. About 1 month ago we received our new wheels, and test fitted them on the car. The pictures speak for themselves.











Jimmy also spent some time working on removing our heavy stock battery and re-routing it to the passenger seat area.