Introducing - Project 1/2-TRAK

[Damn True]

So....not a lot happened in September. It was a busy month at work because I was only AT work for about 2 weeks out of the four. My wife and I spent a week in Hawaii, and another week fishing and camping in the Sierra's. She treated me pretty good for my birthday. All things considered I'd have preferred Camaro stuff to going to Hawaii. Having lived there for seven years it feels more like going home than going on a vacation. But it was nice to get out of the office. The fishing trip though was awesome. The planks are 2"x12" for reference.



So as I said a few posts back, I got the sheet metal stripped from the car pretty easily. No broken or stripped hardware and no rust to speak of. As you can see though, the subframe is really grungy.



Not bad considering the age of the car. Really stoked about the lack of rust. This really was a "grandma car" and as such it was never really driven hard so I'm not even finding evidence of severe wear or any kind of stress cracks.



So I stripped all the suspension off and yanked the subframe in preparation for sandblasting and then finish welding.

Here's what we started with



A little quick work with a wire wheel allowed me to inspect the potential trouble spots for cracks before sandblasting and allows me to explain what I'm up to here. You see how the subframe is only partially welded? Well each unwelded bit is a flex point and the beginning of each weld is a stress riser.



So what we are going to do is link all of the factory welds and tie the whole thing together.

I thought this was going to be easy, but nooooo. It seems that a 40 year old lap joint is nigh impossible to clean. I sandblasted it. I wire brushed it. I sprayed solvent in there and blew it around with a blow-gun. I heated the joint with a torch to burn off contaminants but my welds were just looking like rubbish. This thread catalogs me figuring out the problem with the help of Jake and Matt...

https://www.pro-touring.com/forum/sh...ad.php?t=46863

So with the problem solved the welds came out pretty well. You can see the factory lap weld above my weld in this picture. It looks like they were stick welding these things and doing so very quickly.





Now remember, these are flux-core welds on a dirty, 40 year old lap joint. My torch technique is as you can see "rusty" to say the least. But, the welds are super solid and fully penetrated.