The Fake Jaguar Thread

[Ulu]

Thank you Kevin. We’ll see how good it really is when I grind it out and look for the porosity. It will probably need some drilling and touch up to make it a really good weld and this is an important part of the structure.

But it also laps onto a continuous tube once assembled, so it’s not ultimately the last straw holding my frame together.

 

[Ulu]

Here it is after the grinding.

It looks somewhat overground but the truth is that the radii of the bends did not match between the two pieces. That doesn’t matter to me and it won’t be seen in the light of day.

You can see deep die marks from the patch, even after grinding and wire brushing, which are some of those rusty lines in there old material.

Here’s the bottom side.

As it turns out there was some very minor under cutting, I got into two of the dimples ;( And there were about three small pits. Otherwise the welds look real solid, and I will drill out those pits and fill them when I weld up the other holes.

Also those cracks where the metal did not actually close up when they stamped this out.

 

[BobbyStillz]

View attachment 210722Because of the gasoline spill, all of the upholstery and carpet was damaged, and of course all the glue had melted, and it was loose. That means it all came out easily.

I was able to save the seats & belts, which were well above the gasoline.

When the car was delivered, the driver rolled it off the truck where it had been parked at a steep angle, allowing gasoline to flood the carburetor. It took quite a bit of cranking to start the first time, and when it did it ran strong, but everything smelled like gasoline badly because it was so flooded.

Now I didn’t realize everything that was going on at this point. There was literally gasoline in a puddle under the seat, the first time I drove this car.

There was a puddle of gasoline in the battery box. There was gasoline soaking the main wire loom, making a big gooey mess, right under the gas tank. There was gas in the frame.

Fortunately no gasoline was leaking in the engine compartment.
View attachment 210723
Unfortunately there were loose wires under the dash for the wiper switch (which was broken) and the hot lead was very close to touching the steering column. I didn’t realize any of that until later. It cranked and cranked like it was flooded as the devil.

When that car started, I mashed the gas pedal down and dumped the clutch, and raced it around the block and into my garage. A total of 1/3 mile. It was as fast as you might imagine a hopped & lightened Volkswagen would be.

I didn’t drive again for 19 months. The first days of ownership were spent stripping the car to get rid of the gasoline and gasoline smell. I didn’t want my garage to burn down!

Doors came off first thing for access.
View attachment 210726
View attachment 210724

I'm glad you survived the initial test drive

 

[Ulu]

It would have been a pain if it had burned to the ground, because I hadn’t insured it yet.

 

[Ulu]

Today I patched all the holes and divots in those little floorboards. It took 40 welds to close it all up for both sides. Sorry, no photos today.

 

[Tallbikeman]

Over two years ago, I bought this Fiberglass kit car.
View attachment 210490
It belonged to a car dealer back east who had it in his collection for a long time and it never was driven.
View attachment 210493
The gauges look beautiful and showed under 400 miles.
View attachment 210492
Consequently the body is all very nice with almost no cracks at all & little more than minor cosmetic damage anywhere.
View attachment 210488
I am in the middle of a total resto-vation, and I’ve had this car together and apart twice now. It was a completely drivable car when I recieved it, but there were some horrible things wrong that I will discuss later.

For now I wanted to start this thread, as I have started working on this car again.

When I bought it I worked on it as much as I had to immediately and then, it sat for about a year.

When I got back to it, I rewired the thing from stem to stern, reinforced the chassis, added rubber body mounts, straightened out the seat mounting, reinforced the runningboard sub frame by welding in steel tubing, and I patched up the Volkswagen floor pan, nasty fuel, and brake system.

Here you can see only some of the horrible wiring being stripped out. During the shipping gasoline head leaked from an overfilled fuel tank and spoiled all the wiring by melting the colors off. It was a crappy job to begin with and I knew it when I bought the car that it would have to be completely rewired.

Here’s a trivia question:

If you give a monkey an infinite supply of quick taps, how many will he use?
View attachment 210496
One on every wire.

Of course this means that every wire will fail in turn. I replaced every wire in the entire car. I soldered all the terminals and they got two layers of heatshrink.

I redesigned the entire loom, both functionally and electrically. Of course no one can drive this car without my instruction, unless they know cars and automotive wiring.

The worst spoilage on the body were the huge holes cut in the firewall (for the huge fuse panel from a ‘73 VW, and the cheap stereo, which I immediately sold.)

There are speaker holes in the tub as well which will have to be dealt with, but they do provide lots of access for assembling and disassembling the body, so I will probably just seal them off with removable panels, and they will be covered by the upholstery. For now you can really hear the engine.

Here you can see me starting to assemble the new miniature marine style fuse panel. This was before I decided to remove every wire from the car and start from scratch.
View attachment 210494View attachment 210495

… much more to come, but duty calls…

At one time I owned a 39 Chevy 1/2 ton pickup truck. This was in 1973. The old Chevy was not running well and all the lights were iffy. I came to the realization that all that old enameled wiring was loosing the cloth insulation. I ended up rewiring the whole truck from scratch. Not too hard on a 39 Chevy. She ran much better afterwards. You are doing good work and she will be safer and better running for your efforts.

 

[Ulu]

Thank you @Tallbikeman
I own a car with cloth & rubber 1940s wire. I bought it in 1984. It’s all in bits right now, but the old loom (much patched) still hangs. I remember being pulled over by the police for weak tail lights. That 47 year old wiring was green wherever the rubber had cracked. It’s now 76 years rotten, whatever is left.

 

[Ulu]

I got sidetracked yesterday doing electrolytic rust removal on this cast-iron thing from my wife.

Then I pooped out early yesterday, or I would have posted the obligatory welding photos.

I had too much smoke from the welding.

I wasn’t paying attention to my setup when I was repositioning the work. I got a welding magnet on the other side too hot. I cooked the plastic paint, and it gassed me out. One whiff of that stuff and I was snorting oxygen to relieve the effects.

I shuffled around with a headache making dinner and conked out early.

 

[Kevin B]

Hope you're feeling better.

 

[Ulu]

Thanks Kevin. I’m loafing today, but not for long.

 

[LukeTheJoker]

Doing some nice work!

 

[Ulu]

Doing some nice work!

I am making it shiny bro. I wire brushed every one of those little dimples from both sides.

There still a whole lot of grinding and sanding to do, and it’s not my favorite part of the whole business so I am not rushing it.

 

[Ulu]

It was plenty hot today but that did not deter me from working on the car.

I finished cleaning up those stampings, and got the main frame rails straightened within reason. But I still have a lot of cleanup to do on the floor. Plus there is still this mess to deal with.

First off, the floor pans were quite misshapen at the forward ends. I put together some little bits of steel and supported them off the floor with a jack. Then I hammered the corrugations back into the floor pan a straight as I could get them.

This straightened up the floor a lot and now I can almost see where I’m going to have to trim it. But there’s this wonky mess to deal with, where (As an added bonus) somebody has inadvertently hammered right through the floor pan.

The seat bases for the front seats (and the clips for the rear) had only been shaved down but never completely removed from the pan. I pulled up the remains because there was rust below.

I did not want to drill a bunch of holes in the pan and then weld them up, so I didn’t use a spot weld cutter. I located the spot welds, and one by one, I ground them out 90% with a Dremel and then peeled off the thinned metal.

I’ve flattened off the little dimples with a body hammer and cleaned them up a little more with the Dremel. Then I started after the rust with a 3/8” drill motor with wire wheel. There’s more to do. Lots more. But at least I got started on it.

 

[Ulu]

This is a very short video but you might want to turn down your sound.

 

[Ulu]

You can see that I brought out the big sander/wire brush to go after the big flat areas. I just realized that this grinder is 120 V AC or DC. I’m trying to imagine the kind of batteries it would take to run this monster which pulls 15 A max at 120 V AC?

 

[Ulu]

I got about half the pan cleaned up on top. Not much rust, but lots of scratches and carpet glue.

 

[Kevin B]

Will you be putting carpet back in?

 

[Ulu]

Carpet and rubber mat. I had to throw all that stuff away because it was soaked in gasoline.

Today I spent a lot of time trying to straighten out the passenger side floor pan and it was worse than I expected.

Anyhow I got the passenger side almost straight & cleaned up halfway but there's no need to post more pictures of that.

I gotta cut all this away. It’s just an abomination.

 

[Ulu]

I had to trim the corners off of these frame rails. As it turns out I had to cut right through my plug weld.

This is a little bit I cut off, showing where I welded a 1/2” diameter hole through 1/8” steel.

I sanded the cut edge of that so you can see the penetration of the weld. It was complete, having been welded from both sides.

If you look closely you can see a couple spots of microscopic porosity. Something on the order of .005 to .010”

I’m really happy that it came out that clean, since I did not back gouge any of these, and I welded from both sides, and I did not flood the backside with Argon.

I have determined that since I am not building a competition vehicle, this will be sufficient.

 

[Ulu]

The rollers gave out on my sliding steel door after 20 years. Where’s the balls!

After driving to three different hardware stores with no luck I went home and found I had a set of exact bearings that I had ordered for my outboard.

I drilled out the old ones, drilled new holes, press fit in some new shafts, and tack welded them in place.

I put the wheels about 2 inches further apart than they originally were, which should make the door a little more stable.

The old bearings were not sealed but these are sealed on both sides, so maybe they will last 20 years too.

I’m still trying to get all the rust off so I can put some paint on it tomorrow and reinstall the door.

Needless to say, no work got done on the fake jaguar today.