horchoha wrote:
I had nightmares about the floor. Anxiety attacks, cold sweats, nerves. . . . .
I borrowed (and slightly edited) the above from Perry's entry of a couple of years ago. Personally, I'd say Perry was optimistic compared to my self-inflicted worries.
Would I get a banana chassis? Would it twist? I still don't know, but I'm on my way to finding out.
I've re-read stuff from several floor-welding threads and from Racer Al, Nick, JD, Mnot, Dave W and others. I'm still not settled on a method, but I did get started on the pattern for the floor. I have the metal sheet for it on hand.
Initially I thought I'd tape stripes of heavy butcher paper together with tape to make a 4'x6' rectangle as that's the size of my steel sheet. It was a virgin cut-off from a big job and I got it super cheap, so it's 4'x6' and not 4'x8'. It would have been a pain to make up the paper pattern, and not very stiff. Fortunately, last week my wife noticed some thin plastic sheets at Home Depot. They're 4'x8' and reasonably stiff, but I figured I could cut it without too much trouble. So, I bought a sheet of it.
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It does sag slightly between the cross-chassis RHS members, but not a huge amount.
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It trims pretty easily with ordinary shears.
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Trimming it to my 1/8" setback line (put down in red sharpie) takes some patience and careful measurement, but it's totally do-able.
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I got the outer chassis rails laid out today. To do some of the inside details (I have a number of twists and turns in the transmission tunnel), I need to trace out a rough outline, trim to that, and then detail cut to my setback lines.
In order to keep sag to a minimum when I turn the chassis, I ran some flat 1"x1-1/2" boards over the plastic and then clamped everything down before turning it over.
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This also lets me set out my interior welding scheme as I'll be able to see what I can reall get at with the MIG torch. Tomorrow, I'll attack the transmission tunnel trimming and add in the small pieces under and forward of the engine mount pads.
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Cheers,