Racoon, yes in fact I do 
Since our last episode...
I had several more tubes to cut before getting on with actual welding, and so last Sunday 6/3 raided my Pile of Steels for resources...lookit that, the most organized I've ever been on metals storage, lemme clue ya. I'm so proud.
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From those I cut several more lateral tubes, cleaned the ends, and set them in place on the layout lines I'd marked on the floor...
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...and discovered that the floor had a high spot, which was causing a vertical misalignment between the passenger side forward taper and the seating box. I attempted to chisel it down (seen here marked with red crayon), but that was ultimately a fail, which killed activity for that day.
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Time passes much too quickly (when we're together laughing...) but
I had a plan though, and that's some foreshadowing.
The following Tuesday I worked from home, and at lunchtime I'd gone to the nearby builders supply place and bought a bunch of 4x8x16 concrete blocks, and a few half-cinderblocks, with which to support the chassis tubes up off of the floor, and off of that high spot. But, the floor was still okay for the seating box, and so Friday 6/8, using my lasers, I realigned the tubes to the layout, and magnetted (to coin a word) everything together.
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On Saturday, after yoga, once again, FIRSTIES!!!
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Just as I had done the B-3 chassis (and gotten very good results) my weld program starts with the welds on the top surface joints of the seating box, check square, and then, flip it over and weld the bottom surface joints. Inner fillets don't happen until the whole of the bottom chassis plane have their top and bottom surface joints done. Trust me, it works - as I so often admonished everyone that they should believe during the B-3 build - MINT. That whole "tack the whole structure and then finished weld at the end" business? Nope.
once I'd got the seating box welded...
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...and it was time to attach the forward tapers and front cross tubes, I raised everything up off the floor onto the concrete blocks and realigned to the CL using the lasers (man, those things are GREAT, really key to setting and maintaining alignments), and then got on with the top and bottom surface joint welds.
Here ( thanks to Pam for the action photography) I'm welding the top surface joint of the drivers side forward taper tube and up rightwards in the pic can be seen the laser projected onto the box screen and forward crossmember
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Once all the top and bottom surface joints were welded, I got on with the internal fillets, and outer corners (the open ends are going to get .125 thick caps) and then sat back to admire my handiwork. Also, I had happened to run out of wire just at the end of the last weld, so, done. Here in this view, you can see the arrangement of the concrete blocks, which both raised the chassis bottom up off of the floor, and held everything in alignment. How did it work, you might ask? Everyone, together now..."MINT!!"
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Monday night I was out there again, cutting the 17-inch long verticals and the upper front crossmember. I had loaded a new roll of .035 into the welder, magnetted and squared the two front verticals with the upper front crossmember, and began welding that together, but was having crap results - and unfortunately did not document with pictures - and the welds were especially shiat. Turns out my wire speed was too high, and that the markings I'd made on the wire speed dial - which had been great for the 16-gage tube on the B-3, were utterly wrong for the .035 I was using now. the wire I'd welded the chassis bottom with was what ever was left over from then B-3 chassis, lo those five years ago. I'd thought it was .035...maybe it was .030.
anyway, I had to re-do those welds on the forward uprights, and so cleaned the crap welds off with my angle grinder and coarse flap-disc, and then ground a bevel into the joint again...
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...and rewelded them, to much more pleasing results.
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then I magnetted the front upright box into place for looks, and that's where it sits right now, until tonight, when I once again bathe in the glorious light of the Magickal Mig Lamp, its fumes wafting serenely thru the air...
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I think I need a wheels-included mockup...
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