The BAD AST Project - Faze II

[astroracer]

I worked at the paying job all day Saturday but I got out in the shop at 4:30 or so. Did some cleanup work on the rear tubs and finished up most of the welding on the driver side. I think I got a blister from all of that dang trigger pulling...
Have any of you used Eastwoods Metal Prep? I highly recommend it for taking off surface rust and general cleanup on "weathered" steel. I sprayed a bit of it on the finger print rust on the tubs and wiped it down with a ScotchBrite pad and it looks better then new.
Before the cleanup

You can see my "hand prints" on the steel from working with it.

After about 2 minutes of work... Shiny clean. And the Metal Prep leaves a phosphate coating so this will not rust from finger print acid again.




Mel came out today and we hit it kinda hard... We had a few small panels to make to get the body ready tto weld in the tubs so we started doing that. Mel made a pattern to replace the rear mud "skirt" at the rear of the wheel well. This is a flat panel that we put a nice bead rolled edge on to stiffen it up and add some strength back into the lower rear fender.



This is where it goes at the bottom of the rear tub.

Welded in place. Now the lower fender doesn't flop around....






We also made some little cover plates to weld over the open ends of the original rails where we cut them out for tire clearance.


After taking care of all this little stuff we finally got the Pass side tub WELDED IN PLACE!!!! Still have to make some small brackets and closeouts but this is already pretty strong. Even for simple spot welds...
This is the front underneath.

And this is the rear. You can see where it welded over the top of the "skirt". This made an excellant weld point and adds a lot of strength into the tub mounts


I'll do a little more welding but once the top gets welded into the side panel and we finish the rear floor flange this will be very strong.
Hopefully next weekend will be a two dayer. I would like to finish up the rears and get going on the left front.
Thanks for looking.
Mark