The Fake Jaguar Thread

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Squaring everything up again, with string, long rulers, big squares, little plumb bobs, and tape.
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I had to trim things twice before I could line it up well enough to tell anything.

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Looks like this 3/8” “sliver” trim will get things square. It might all still need to get a bit shorter.
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I believe that I calculated the steel tunnel at the crossmember will need 1/2” trimmed off, But I can’t recall if that was from the long end or the short end of the floor, because it’s not square.
 
Today I am down to the part of my chassis mods that I have dreaded.

In order to trim the floorboards I have to assemble the weldment and then mark the interference points and then disassemble it and then trim.
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Then I have to do the whole thing again and again: disassembling and trimming, and assembling and marking, until I get the whole thing to fit.

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The good news is that after several rounds of this it is almost in alignment.

Just a few more trims and it will be ok.
 
Well after five more trims, I figure I still only have about 10 to go now.

I’m at that point where I’m chasing dimensions in a circle, trying to make everything come out all at once.

A tiny little deviation at one point in the floor pan can throw the rail off a whole inch at the back end.

Everything is difficult to measure and I was planning to build myself a trammel to help take care of that. It hasn’t happened yet however.
 
I am having great difficulty making the cross corner measurements on my chassis. I need to get this car square.

So I have decided I could build a trammel and I did. Over 12 feet long.
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It’s difficult to photograph. Also crude. No micrometer adjustments. A sliding pointer:
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I find that My car is off over 1/2” from corner to corner. (I thought it would be much worse!)

I need to take some more diagonal measurements, but everything thing else is pretty much possible with a tape measure.

Then, Back to the marking and trimming.
 
!/2" is not bad, many production cars used to be within 1".

I remember when I built my 3-wheel Lomax, once I got the chassis square it was then a problem to fit the fibreglass body... ;)
 
GeePig said:
!/2" is not bad, many production cars used to be within 1".

I remember when I built my 3-wheel Lomax, once I got the chassis square it was then a problem to fit the fibreglass body... ;)
Click to expand...

I do think this might be a problem that the body has taken a set over the years and will be slightly twisted and banana shaped.

Maybe I will have an excuse to cut the whole car through the passenger compartment and add 2 inches to the wheelbase.

This car steered pretty straight & when I originally measured it out it was only off about a half inch then. But it wasn’t stiff.
 
BTW, still assembling and disassembling.
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I forgot to take the rear heater control tubes out of the tunnel. So today I have strip it down in order to get in there. Plus, I decided it was time to finish cleaning inside of the tunnel and shoot some paint in there.
 
I had to back off from my chassis setup, to address several minor chores, which I have foolishly neglected.

I dressed off the ragged end of my clutch cable guide tube & patched it out with solvent and paper patches. It took about 3doz times before it was clean enough.
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There you can see the raggedness around the accelerator cable guide, which still needs dressing.

The VW tunnel has a rat nest of shift rod, fuel line, and 10 control cable guides. I only need the parking brake, clutch, gas & fuel. The six heater cable guides needed to go. In the photos, two are already cut out.

There is a notch at the arrow, where I have nearly cut these 2 tubes loose at the welds.
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The same bracket holds the parking brake cables you see, so I had to to go carefully.

I used my Pakistani Sawzall to reach in and cut these 4 tubes loose.
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By hand. This was tedious, but accurate. The genuine Milwaukee blade made it happen.

The other tube ends were welded thru the tunnel & I have one drilled free. One I have cut loose from the other end of the tunnel, by reaching inside, with a mini tubing cutter.

It was about 112F in the boatyard, and I had to quit before those 4 tubes were all removed.
 
I got all 4 remaining tubes out of the tunnel. I was glad to see them go. They didn’t leave willingly.
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The welds were larger on the 2nd set. I made an improved saw which eased the cutting somewhat.
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The top welds were solid, but the bottoms were very weak or just plain missing.

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They were solidly welded in pairs, and so they will remain.
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Once I broke them loose, I had to hook them with a heavy wire.
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Then I drew the pairs out with a small slide hammer.
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It took a little knocking, because they had to straighten up somewhat to clear the tunnel.

Wow…..look at that room! Now I can finally clean this mess up.

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Eventually I must get the brake line and new fuel line in here, but first some serious rust abatement.
 
Today I finally got the accursed shifter rod out of the VW tunnel.
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The rod was shortened with a steel slug welded in. On one side only. ;(
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Clearly this was done while the rod was inside the car, perhaps because they had already assembled it all too far. The whole front suspension suspension adapter would have had to come off to get to the access port on the front of the VW frame.

Or maybe they made it too long and had to mod it so the car would shift correctly. Who knows?

The good news is that I have a new bushing and this good German rubber coupler assembly.

Once the shift rod has been removed you can see even more clearance inside the tunnel.
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Also you see this little gun site which is where the plastic shifter bushing is supposed to remain. Because of the lumpy welding arrangement it simply could not happen and that was that.
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Looking inside from the back of the chassis I can see that there really is very little rust on the bottom of the tunnel floor.
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It is only superficial rust because of this drain hole that let the water run out back here. This is looking really good.

After all of the vacuuming and hose washing and air hose blowing and more vacuuming and turning this thing practically on its head, I was very surprised to see that there are still some remains of mice nests inside the car.
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This is probably stuff that was caught in the seams, and I vibrated it loose when I took a pneumatic muffler chisel to the steel.
 
Here you can see how much more I had to saw off of the left side of this bracket. The right side was very easy by comparison, and the improved design saw made a great difference in the amount of time and effort required to do the left.
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I didn’t clean out the parking brake cable guides yet. This is my best time, as they are clearly filthy, and only to get dirtier as I clean the tunnel for paint.

Once I paint this and flip it over there will still be some welding on the tunnel so there will be touchup paint at some point.

I will not have to put any of this back together for a long time.
 

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