It's a Tank!

Gas tank that is.

I have finished with the welding on the interior of the car, and am moving to the trunk. It is somewhat common to have rust in the corners on the trunk--and I have a very small amount around one of the places where it bolts to the frame at the very back. While the body man who looked at my car wasn't terribly worried about it, I've decided to go ahead and weld in clean, fresh metal.

Safety first, however. I need to get the gas tank out of the way.

Today was a beautiful day, so after a trip to the salvage yard this morning to get a tail light and a rear view mirror for my poor old truck, I spent the morning pulling the metal at the rear of the bed into rough enough shape to be able to put the tail light in place. Of course, I didn't make it look pretty--that would just be time away from working on the Studebaker!

This afternoon was nice and warm, so I rolled the Stude out of the garage and put the rear end on jack stands so I could fit my 5-gallon gas can underneath and drain out the gas. My lawn mower will be happy.

To think, just 2 days ago there was about 8 inches of snow on my drive. . .

 After disconnecting the fuel line, and the filler neck (there's a hose that clamps on like a radiator hose), it was simply a matter of resting the tank on another jack stand and unbolting 4 bolts (3 on the left, one on the right--which has a spring: you can see it  in the picture above) and then lowering it to the ground.

There was a small surprise--the top of my gas tank used to be someone's home:

Fortunately, the occupants were long gone.

The tank looks very good inside--but the cork float was saturated in gas which could explain why the fuel gauge always read empty. I'll probably still have it boiled out and then coat it with a sealant just to be safe. It is easy enough to do and cheap insurance to make sure my carburetor stays clean.

A St. Patty's Day Surprise

It started out as a nice weekend.

First, I went a few miles north to Independence, Oregon to help a fellow Studebaker driver (Ed) work on the front suspension of his 1963 R2 GT Hawk. For those who aren't familiar with Studebakers, the R2 denotes the supercharged engine. Ed's GT is a beautiful car, and looks to be a wonderful driver. He's going through the front suspension making sure everything is ready for the summer season. On Saturday he was getting everything disassembled so he could replace the kingpin bearings. Since I'd never done anything with a Studebaker front suspension (and will soon be) I asked Ed if I could come up and watch--and assist if he could use the help.

There wasn't much need for assistance--but I did get to see how to take the king pin apart. Always good to know.

I headed back and that afternoon I got everything cleaned up and ready for the final patch in the interior of the car. And this afternoon, I got half of that patch spot welded into place--like the driver's side, I discovered that I needed to split the patch in two in order to get it to line up properly. I'll post some pics soon.

Unfortunately, I was unable to work on the car this morning as planned. Last night (at around 1 a.m.)  someone hit and run my old pickup--too much St. Patty's cheer I suppose. Now my old pickup is just that--a very solid mechanically, but pretty ugly mid-80's Ford F150 that I purchased as a work truck. So I'm not terribly upset. But by the time the police report was filled out and all the broken glass and bits of the other car (a mirror, a torn section of a fender, etc.) were cleaned up, my morning was pretty much gone.

If the taillight hadn't been destroyed, it'd be ready to drive anywhere.

My apologies for the diversion from Studebaker things but I figured most car people would be vaguely curious about the accident.

One side down!

Since I was at the limit where I'd start to lose vacation time if I didn't take it and since the weather was supposed to be nice, I took Thursday and Friday off of work. My wife, who was in the same boat with her vacation time did the same.

Normally we'd take advantage of the nice weather and head over to the coast for some hiking (the skunk cabbage should be starting to bloom over there and, with all the wet weather we've had lately, the banana slugs should be out in force) but I'd given my plague-like cold to my wife and she spent the time in bed. So off to the garage for me.

First thing, after spending a bit trying to get my patch to fit the opening cut out for it, I discovered there was more difference than I expected between the original floor pan stamping and this patch panel. So to make things easier, I cut the larger piece in half and, then, after a bit of bending and prodding, spot welded it into place.

patch 1 in place

Then it was simply a matter of lining up the 2nd half as best as I could and tacking it down.

 

not perfect (yet) but it fits

As you can see in the 2nd pic (if you click on it to blow it up to full size) there's an area that doesn't quite line up. So with a cutting wheel in my trusty dremel, I sliced that part out, removed a bit of the metal behind it, then slid the offending piece into the proper position. I added a few more welds between the rest of the spot welds and start filling. I also drilled holes in the metal on either side of the seam to assist in the creation of spot welds to the front body support directly beneath.

Now this didn't all go as smoothly as I described. One of the main differences between an inexpensive mig welder and a better model is the amount of time you can weld at a pass. So every so often my welder would simply shut down and I'd have to give it a break.  And as I said in an earlier blog post, I'm a little rusty at welding, so there'd be times I'd burn through the metal and would have to go back and carefully fill that in. Plus I did need to cut small bits out of scrap to fill in those holes where the old floor didn't quite match up with the new patch. But after several hours of work (over the course of 4 days--hey, I had other things to do, like take the dogs for a walk out in the foothills and sit in my recliner and play a few computer games--I was on vacation after all) I got it completed.

Done! (well, almost)

I still need to do a little clean-up underneath (the areas that burned through will need to be ground down on the underside of the car) but I'm going to move on to the other side--this one has been treated so it won't rust until I can get it sealed up with epoxy primer.

Oh, and in the lessons learned department, I leave you with this picture:

Note to self: move the creeper out from under the car when welding.

shaping

No matter how well made a patch might be, I've never found one yet that didn't need some sort of adjustment. And so, after a week of fighting off a cold (it was determined that I didn't have the bubonic plague, like I'd suspected at times) I finally got a little time into the garage to work on the second patch.

The first step is to cut the larger piece down to a more manageable size, which I've shown in the above picture. Then it is simply a matter of fitting it to the opening. At this point, I'm still massaging it a bit before I cut it down and butt weld the repair panel into position.

Starting Patch 2. . .

The second patch is the largest area--again, while I only need to patch a smaller area I like having a wide margin around rust.

First, though, I have a nice steering wheel that I don't want to get goobered up with splatter from the welding. So it had to go.

Wheel gone! Rust holes visible to the left.

Of course it wasn't as easy as that--I do happen to own a wheel puller, but unfortunately, it wouldn't fit the narrow distance between the mounting points on the Studebaker wheel.  So off to the parts store to rent one. After having the proper tool in hand, the job only took 3 minutes.

Once the wheel was out of the way, removing one bolt on the bottom of the column and disconnecting the shift linkage allowed for removal of the outer shell of the steering column.

Does that look like something to bump your head against?

To remove the steering post requires removing the steering box. Unfortunately, I didn't have a joint separator that fit, so that will have to wait until later.  For now at least I won't be damaging a potentially expensive part, and, so far, I haven't bumped my head on it.  Hopefully I'll be able to get the right tool so I can get that out of the way before that happens.

On to the floor.  I got the area cut out using a cut off wheel on my angle grinder. This one was a bit trickier because the floor is spot welded to the brace, so I had to locate and grind through them. Once that was done, I cleaned up the surface rust with a wire brush and coated it with a rust converter so it wouldn't continue to rust.

If that brace weren't there, I'd have a one-legged Flintstone's car!

I discovered some good news: the cross brace was in excellent condition. And, surprisingly, no rust on the rocker panel.

Up next, I'll cut out a patch and get this puppy closed up.

Patch 1, Done (pretty much)

So I finally had time to work on the Stude today. If you'll recall, I had 3 areas to patch on the floor; today I decided to patch the area behind the driver's seat.

The red arrow marks the spot

The rusted through area was about 3 to 4 inches in diameter. I wanted to make sure I got all of the rust, so I cut out an area much larger:

The bad stuff removed, the remaining metal treated--ready to weld in a patch.

From this point on, I didn't take many pics. But it was a fairly simple process. First, I made a pattern by taping a piece of cardboard above the hole, then tracing around the opening from the bottom with a sharpie. After that is carefully cut out and made sure it fits the hole exactly, the pattern is used to trace an outline on the new piece and it was cut out with a jig saw.

Of course, I erred on the side of making it too big, then fit it by cutting/grinding where needed. Once I got it matched up, I used 3 large magnets to hold it in place with the edges flush, and welded several spots around the perimeter.  Then, after removing the magnets, I made more spots, spacing them to avoid warping the metal from the heat. Once I had a group of welds about 2 to 3 inches apart, I started to connect the dots.

In theory, this works very well, and for the most part it did. But I haven't welded anything this thin for quite some time, so there were several places I burned holes through it.  And, when I first started, some of my welds weren't very pretty--that's why there aren't any pictures!

But the end result (I still have a small bit of grinding to do and I'll go over it with a body hammer and dolly to level it out a bit) looks like this:

Nice and solid (and also treated again to stop rust until it is painted) now!

Of course, if this were in an area that showed, I would take more time to make it absolutely perfect--but this will eventually be covered in a thick, sound deadening "paint" with insulation and carpet on the top side and undercoating on the bottom so it simply won't show.

On Monday I'm having the owner of a body shop come by to give me an estimate for paint. It won't be long until it is away from my garage for a while.

Work, but not on the Studebaker

I know! I haven't done much work on the car lately. But sometimes work intrudes--it has been hectic the last couple of weeks and now I'm away at training for a week.

Just so you don't get bored and go into Studebaker withdraw, here's a Studebaker puzzle you can solve on your computer. See you soon.

Back to work

Had a big present waiting for me when I got home tonight:

Driver's side--fortunately, I won't need all of this--that would be a lot of welding.

Man, that stuff is thick!

Space!

I'd mentioned earlier that I was running out of space in the garage, so this weekend I did something about it.

I still have room for more stuff!

I was to the point where I was afraid that I would accidentally step on a panel or piece and damage it--aside from the obvious health hazards of working in an overcrowded workplace. So while waiting for stuff to show up, I'll be dragging a few things down to put in my small rented storage place.

Not much else happening. We had an unusual cold snap for us this weekend--even had snow on the ground here on the valley floor; it was too cold to spend much time in the garage. Plus I'm still waiting on my sheet metal to arrive. But now, once it does, I'll at least be able to walk around my car to work on it without having to move things.

A slightly different tack

Although I haven't been posting much lately, it doesn't mean that there hasn't been movement on the Studebaker project. There simply hasn't been enough going on to make a decent post. But I started changing that this weekend.

Originally, I had planned on having the body media blasted, then primed, then I'd have it returned so I could weld in the patch panels in the floor. After much consideration I decided to change that slightly--I'm going to weld the areas on the main body unit first--so floor patches (doing larger areas than needed just to make sure), a small area around the door frame that holds the rubber weatherstripping in place (about a 3" length of that), and an area on the right rear of the trunk that I probably don't need to replace but will anyway.

So to that end I've welded supports across the open doors.; this will hopefully resolve any movement in their relative location while I cut sections of the floor out. This is probably overkill, but it is better than struggling to get the doors to align properly after everything has been sealed and painted.

Cutting lines have been outlined in blue tape.

I've also ordered the replacement metal. Hopefully it will be shipped soon.

The hope of all this is that once the body makes it to the body shop for the media blasting that it can stay there until the paint is completed. Fingers crossed: it should be in good enough shape to be primed and painted with minimal fuss.

Up next? After all the cutting and welding, I pull the engine and transmission so the body shop can have excellent access to the firewall.