The BAD AST Project - Faze II

[Bryce]

That hammertone paint works very well.

[astroracer]

Thanks Bryce,
Yes it does work well. I used the same paint on the 49 Ford F1 control arms I painted last year, so I knew what it looked like. I will be painting the front arms with it and I think I will paint the chassis with it also. I need to find it in qt cans...
I am still see-sawing on colors for the van but I am leaning toward a White/Silver/Orange theme with the orange as an accent color only to bring out the chevy orange motor.

I just got a UPS notice! My axles are sitting on my front porch... I need to get out of here and work on the van!

[astroracer]

How about a quick update? I have no pics from today as BOTH of my camera batteries decided to die at the same time. I just ordered new ones tonight.
Mel and I got the rest of the rear suspension put together today. Here is some of the stuff we worked on.
* Made the upper 4 bar frame brackets.
* Tacked on the upper bar brackets
* Built the panhard bar housing bracket and tacked it to the housing
* Tacking that to the housing we could finish up fitting the PHB frame bracket.
* Tacked and then finish welded the PHB bracket.
* Once all of that junk was in place we could fit the upper shock crossmember.
* We used a piece of 2" x 1/8th wall DOM for that, drilled holes for the shock mount sleeves, notched the ends to fit over the rails and tacked it in.
* I cut a piece of 1" x 1/8 wall DOM to make the panhard bar. Got that weled up and in the chassis.
I will be making some filler plates for the ends of the shock crossmember and doing a lot of welding this coming week.
Got a lot done today! There is a functional rear suspension in the van right now. That is HUGE!!!
I will get pics as soon as I get batteries.
Thanks for reading about my junk
Mark

[wellis77]

Sounds like you got a lot done Mark. Great job, looking forward to the pics.

[astroracer]

Hey Will,
Sure did, and we hit it hard again this weekend! I got the new battery for the shop camera Thursday so I got a few update pics from last weekend.
This is a pic of the housing panhard bracket tacked in place. With the panhard bar mocked in.

Another angle.

Here is a pic of the whole suspension hanging in the chassis.

This is the outer gusset for the panhard bar frame bracket tacked in place.

The upper shock xmbr tacked in. I will be making gusset plates for this to tie it into the rail better and it will also carry a set of down tubes for the cage.

Mark

[astroracer]

This is a pic of the custom decals I had made for Bad Ast Motorsports.

I am putting the stickers on all of the suspension parts as they are finished.

Storage for the 4 link and panhard bars.

Today and yesterday the chassis saw the light of day AND the underside of a certain Astro Van... We started marrying the chassis to the body Saturday. Cleaned out a LOT more of the crossmembers (all of them to be exact) made a few notches in the forward rail sections and got the chassis shoved up in there...

Making way for the new chassis... There were 8 of these "tabs" left, spot welded to the old rails that we cleaned off today

After hitting them with a plug cutter and chisel...

Cleaned up with the grinder...

Rail notches for frame clearance. I will plate these in over the winter. The drivers side is a bit more "notchie" then the pass side.


After a couple of days worth of cutting and grinding we got the frame up in a near semblance of it's actual position.



I found this...

INSIDE the right hand rail section... WHY would a bird want to get in the rail? Probably to make a nest but it couldn't get out... Sad, very sad.
Thanks for looking.
Services and funeral are next Thursday at 11:00AM.

[Martin71RS]

LOL

excellent work as usual...the Bad Ast stickers are a nice touch! Are you planning on actually starting a business or is it just for fun?

[wellis77]

Looks great Mark! A lift would have made the job of installing my chassis so much easier... Can't wait to see more.

[astroracer]

Thanks guys, The stickers are just for fun Martin, I have a few guys ask about doing some design work but, once it boils down to actually PAYING for the design work, nobody wants to do that.
Hey Will, yea the lift is a god send, as you will see in this post.
I worked on trimming down body mount bushings during the week and got the chassis centered up and aligned so Mel and I could get the mount brackets finished up and tacked on today. We got all of that done AND pulled the chassis out and put it back on the rotisserie AND took the van off the lift and rolled it over to the cold side of the shop so I can putter with it this winter. I hope you enjoy the pics.
Trimming the mounts. I set them up in the horizontal bandsaw and trimmed them down to one inch high.

This 7 of the 8 I did. I still need two more to finish them up.

After squaring up the chassis we measured how much we would need to notch the body mount brackets. 1" by 2" was the magic number.
Running the tubing through the verticle saw.

After getting all of the brackets ready I tacked them to the frame. We re-used the 6 old cradle mounts and added 4 new (two per side) towards the rear.


We fabbed up the rear mounts from 1/4" plate and some short sections of 2 x 3 tube.

These are just tacked right now. I am going to start the finish welding tomorrow.
As they look in the van.


We got the van off the hoist and onto the body cart. It sure did roll around nice.

My wife had a good time taking us for rides...

Once we got it rolled back in the shop we raised it up off the cart and set it on some jack stands.


The chassis is back in the shop. With body mounts! Have a few additional brackets to make and finish the welding. That will be tomorrow.

Thanks for looking
Mark

[astroracer]

Well, today was good day. We got a crap load of "little bits" done. Capping off and reinforcing the upper shock crossmember, capping off the body mount brackets and getting the support tubes made for the lower shock mounts and panhard bar mount on the rear end. I also did a LOT of welding today. The housing has some to do yet and the chassis is probably about half way there.
One of the caps...

You can see the some of the other pieces we made today already welded in.

The passenger side.

I will be using these areas to carry the roll cage down bars so we plated it in with a flat area for the tube to sit on and weld too.
Fitting the lower shock mount support bars.


The panhard bar support.

I tied the lower shock and panhard bar supports into a small plate welded to the housing.
It's hard to see here but the plate welds in over the lower shock tube and bottom edge of the housing and the panhard bar tube sits on it. It also very effectively spreads the load over a larger area.

One of my welds. I am getting better.

Body mount weld.

We got a ton of work done this weekend.
I will be plugging away at the finish welding this week. I have a few early welds I need to grind out and re-weld so that is what I will be working on.
Thanks for looking
Mark

[wellis77]

Looking good Mark! You're making great progress!

[craigs73]

wow its looking great

[Greasy63]

OMFGarsh! this is gonna be soooo SWEET!!!!

You got pretty Good looking welds there!

Keep up the good work!

I hope when she's done she's SLAMMEDthat'll be so Awesome!

[Ratty 46]

Great build ... my wifes daily is a Safari & I had an earlier model before. I always wondered what one of these would look like all built up.

I'm in ... I dig it - keep me posted.

R46

[astroracer]

Thanks alot guys! Things have been going slow. Got all of the chassis welds completed over the weekend along with the rearend housing. I added some triangulation bars to the back side of the lower suspension cradle. Fabbed them up out of 1 5/8 DOM and fit them to the bottom of the side rails.
This is the passenger side (upside down on the rotisserie)

Looking at the rail fitup. This was a head scratcher... Took some thinking and mocking up to get the cuts right...

I got the shock towers mocked up and welded tonight. That means the welding is about 99.9% complete. I have LOT of clean up to do to get it ready for paint but that will happen this weekend.

After the welding.


This what I've been up to.
Thanks for looking
Mark

[astroracer]

This is another thing I have been doing. A friend of mine has a little junkyard just up the road from me. He brouoght this down for me to strip. I pulled off the entire front end, Hydroboost setup, tilt column, overhead console (and bracket), instrument cluster and throttle pedal, the last few nights. I will get the doors for the electric windows and locks and I will strip out all of the light grey interior trim and dash along with all of the wiring. I think the light grey will look better then the beige that is in the van right now...

This thing is a pile. It had almost 260K on it though so it was rode hard and put away wet...
It had been hit hard in the right front also. You can see some wrinkles in the sub-structure. This is kind of wierd because Bad Ast had been hit hard in the right front also...

The hood is bent at both corners so that will be used as a donor for hood experimentation.

The roof console and bracket.

[linkstar69]

Neat progress

[wellis77]

Nice Mark. I love your shock towers. I have something similar planned for my chassis in another month. Keep up the good work!

[astroracer]

Thanks Will, I appreciate your incouragement!
This weekend was another milestone! WE HAVE PAINT!!! The chassis is primed in black, the upper and lower control arms and panhard bar are in dark gray hammered and the spindles and rear housing are black hammered. I think I will spray the frame with the black also... It comes in a quart can and I think it looks nice.
The chassis as we got parts primed. We started at the back and worked our way forward.
Yesterday.


Today.

Didn't wait for the paint to dry for these...


The chassis stil has some work yet, front bumper brackets and some roll cage work but at least now it can go thru the winter in one color.
Thanks for looking
Mark

[astroracer]

The rear end and spindles got a Rustoleum black hammertone finish. I worked on deburring the housing yesterday and ran the spindles thru the sand blaster and got them primed.
The housing after I had sprayed it with rust converter. It was ready for primer after this stuff dryed.

Another shot.

After a couple of coats of rustoleum grey primer.


I decided to go with a darker color for the housing and spindles. Just to break things up a bit.


The spindles in ALL of their modified glory. I still have to drill and tap for the Corvette brake adapter.


Let me know what you think!
Mark