After a full weekend of bashing my head against the tubes, I've come up with this.



Both the tops and bottoms of this bar are attached using 1/2" captive nuts as I don't want to be working with more than one socket to take it out if the need should ever arise.



There are 1/8" plate doublers on the frame rails with nuts welded on to the plates. It's not all tacked up as I'm out of argon and that will have to wait for another day.

The main bar went together with 1/2" button welds plus the closing plates. It's not going anywhere.



Once welded - it's not going anywhere.

Ohhhh I see! Dude, this is freaking fantastic!

I got nothing to add except WOW... Beautiful execution and it should have all the structural rigidity you could ever want for your coil overs to mount too.

Sorry for the delay - I rarely get update notifications from the site so I have to keep checking back for updates.

Rabin

I love it when a plan comes together. Fantastic work, Craig. I'm very interested to see the evolution, and humbled by the quality of your fabrication.

Thanks guys - Loved the A-Team. LOL. I've been out there every night but so far I've only added to the scrap pile getting the sway rigged up. I'll be finished that detail and a few other things by Christmas. Should be all welded up in another week once the fabrication ends!

Weekend update. The last bit of fabrication on the rear subframe was to mount the rear sway bar. I'm using a splined 3 piece NASCAR style bar as the ability to tune on a custom frame is important. Who knows how much sway bar I'm going to need? I'd like options that come in at around $80 shipped...in fine diameter increments. The standard brackets look like this and are teflon bushed.



I whipped up a couple of brackets and thought I'd just drill them out to tap drill size, weld them on and tap the hole.

That went something like this.

Make mount.


Check hole centres.



Create overly complicated jig to get things in the proper alignment for tacking.



Ensure things were perfectly level. My uphand TIG needs practice. Yikes.



Then tack this stuff in place...more complications.



Then tap the holes only to discover that there is a slight, and I mean slight, misalignment that can't be fixed. So I had to cut it all out, hog out the frame holes and tack it up like this.



Which looks totally like a hack job, but that bar has no stiction. Smooth as silk. Only wasted 1/2 a day on this. Welding it took a few minutes.

Then Sunday I started the welding in earnest. The idea is to weld up as much as I can with the differential mounted and then pull that and finish what needs finishing on the bench. Lots of out of position -arms and hands waiving in the air and TIG wire hitting the rafters in this one. It's still coming out nice, but man, it's crazy hard to do.

First up, weld the brace inner joint.



Then hunt and peck around the frame trying to manage heat and limit distortion.

I've added these gussets that I made with a tool that I built for my press. Pretty slick. There it is, about 1/2 done.

That's looking beefy as hell, great job!

I took a few extra hours yesterday to get some of the tricky welding done. Every conceivable angle was achieved - a total nightmare half of the time. I think I used up 1/2 a new tungsten electrode from weird dips at odd angles.





Still a few left to go. Most of it turned out really nice, but the damn strut bar mounts pulled (I only had to weld the little gap beside the coil over bracket. Dammit.



So that's going to take some work with the torch to straighten out.

The rest of the welds are pretty straight forward. Hope to have it all done this week so I can have it installed over the weekend.

FOR THE FINAL TIME.

Looks great Craig! Such a complex structure I think you did great for managing distortion.

A buddy used to be an engineer at what used to be Flexi-Coil in Saskatoon and I remember him saying they started using vibratory stress relief (similar to http://www.meta-lax.com/) when welding up their massive implements. I've always wondered if there was a "backyard" way to get similar results. Interesting side benefit was that they used it for moving large stationary machines - they'd vibrate it until it was vibrating enough to push it into place... (Not quite the natural frequency of the machine - but it'd be close!)

Are you powdercoating before install? Or will the whole car be built and finish fitted before disassembly for final paint / powder?

Rabin

Thanks Rabin. I think the intensity of the heat that the TIG puts out makes it pull a lot more than say if I MIG welded it. At least there is no issue with an unfused root. We used to have to do stress relieving on various weldments for the mining industry (I was NOT allowed to weld that stuff) so I get the idea.

So a little careful heating and some pressure should have me back to 100% tonight. All of this will get a light dust of paint after it's fitted. It will go for powder once I'm done and have all the various brackets for things like brake lines, exhaust hangers and whatever else. This will be my approach to the front end as well with the exception that I can't remove it once it's welded in place.

A little heat on the outside of the brackets was what the doctor ordered. Drove a cold chisel into the gap and then inserted a 1/4" shim plus a 1/16" shim for clearance and as it cooled they got loose. So all is well that ends well with this deal. Just some more welding to go.

I'm really working on controlling the TIG heat on this project. Getting it down - it makes a tremendous difference in how the weld turns out with a few hundred degrees making all the difference between a grey featureless mess and a nice shiny TIG stack of dimes.

There should really be a Weldporn or Fabrication Life Facebook page dedicated to grey featureless messes. I'd finally be able to contribute something.

Picked up this little tip from a guy that builds tube chassis on one of the afore mentioned Facebook pages. Both sides are rigged up and ready to weld, but first a few other touch-ups.



I've had enough of this junk moving on me while I weld it - so even though it's tacked up, i don't want to deal with moving parts anymore.

My crazy welding table is super handy for these odd positions.



Rear weld area ready for welding. I only had one bushing, so the other side I put a jack in the other side.



I'll toss this one in just for Matt.

Stacks and stacks of dimes.

One more post before Christmas. Spent a couple of days just finalizing all the welding and making sure that everything was all done perfectly. Then I took half a day and ground all the tabs and got all the brackets touched up and ground. So while I was at it, I thought I may as well take the surface conditioning disk and polish all the tube work. It's important to break all the edges so that when it's powder coated, there are no sharp edges for the powder to run off of when it's baked.

Here's the result.







Now to build the sway bar arms.

Merry Christmas Rube Goldberg!

Seriously though, awesome work here... take a day or two and relax, you've earned it.