MattMobile Update: More Welding, More Supports

Greetings true believers!

Since my last blog post, I have had a really great time doing some welding and metal fabrication on the car. I can tell you this for sure: metal fab'ing is VERY time consuming, and results do not come quickly. Working with wood was SO much easier than metal. I'm definitely still on a learning curve, so please don't condemn my ugly welds too quickly :D

I had a few things on my to-do list for today, and after 11 hours of non-stop work, I almost completed them. My main goal right now is really to get the shell mounted on the chassis. That's it. Sounds easy. Right? There are five mounting points on each side of the car, for a total of ten. Each of the mounting points requires a custom made mounting post. Many of them are not mounted directly to the chassis, but are instead mounted to part of the infrastructure that has yet to be built inside the car. So it's a pretty daunting task.

Here you can see the drivers side mount. I finished building up the posts that will form the outer wall of the cockpit, and the mounting post is welded to that.

Same thing for the passenger side.

There are two remaining shell mounting points on the bottom arc of the fins, in what will be the trunk space of the car. In order to attach those points to the frame, I need to build out some structures back there. I started by modifying one of the roll bars that Bo The Welder had previously built. The basic shape was left in tact, I just added legs to it.

Here's the jig I set up on the table to help me weld it straight and flat.

Overall the results were pretty good, though not perfect, that's for sure. There's a little bit of bend to the arch, but I'm not too worried about that.

With that bar in place, I needed to build out some support bars. This is a view into the trunk from the drivers side. You can see a bar extending from the roll cage, running horizontally. That's the one I'm working on when I took this photo.

After a very long day of work, the only thing remaining is those two mounting spots at the base of the fins. I then need to fabricate a rear bumper, and add some reinforcement to the posts I built to hold the mounting points by the rear tail lights.

After that, I will lift the shell off the frame and weld up all the seams that I could not access while the shell was in place. I think there's a good chance I could get all of that accomplished at my next trip to the shop.