UnderControl

I'm mulling over some ideas for a "shaping station". Mostly for having a place to put the sandbag that isn't otherwise a work surface, but working on ways to incorporate more tooling options. In the meantime I added some additional accessories.

I've got a few more ideas for additional tool posts I'll sprinkle in as I get to them. For the fender patch I was mostly having a bitch of a time getting the arch developed. Ended up making a die out of a chunk of 3/4 plate and was able to get the shape, but got a bit off the line and well, now I'm doing wiring. Was recently reminded that I need this car drivable this summer, and bolt on body panels don't actually make it drive. Not a lot to show at this point I have the fuse block roughly fixed into place, then undid basically all of the pre-branching I had done on the bench.

Continuing to move along with little shop improvements. This time around I got to making the hitch receiver style tool mount for the bench I've been threatening to make for years. For the first tool to stand I figured on a mount for my extra vise.

At the frustratingly tedious part of fine tuning the patch panel and really until it's ready it'll pretty well look the same. In the meantime I got back to the press break I had started working on moons ago. While not technically finished, it's done enough to give it a test run. Just a quick run at it with a bit of 1.5" x 0.25 and 15" of 11ga. Managed to bend them each about 3* passed 90 before bottoming out.

Several hours of banging, wheeling and shrinking down, several more to go.

Last of the rust repair on the list is the passenger fender. I started making one patch for it a while ago and while I decided if I'm going to scrap it I figured I'd start on the other corner.

Fast forwarding a bit and the passenger side sail panel lead seam I started working on a very long time ago is gone. In the meantime I ended up picking up a new mig since my Hobart is officially ded. Didn't really want to spend a lot of money on a mig right now, so took a shot on the Eastwood 180. So far, it's OK. It works at all, so big step up and I do like the variable voltage selection over the few fixed positions of the Hobart. The spool holder is absolute garbage and I believe contributes to or maybe the entire reason for what feels like a jerky feed. End of the day it gets the job done and with a few tweaks it should run smoother. Quick lap test on 16ga. Upper is little e's lower straight drag and pause.

Rework complete, and now at least everything is useable. Ended up doing a combination of extending the lever off the tool and scalloping the pedals to get an extra inch of travel. I still need to add bracing to keep things from flopping around, and I picked up a plate to turn into a table for the bead roller, but those are things I don't have to stop other work to do.

Added a good welding hood to the list of things I wish I had gotten a long time ago. Found a rare decent deal on fleabay and got myself a few good hammers and some more beaters.

Well, the shrinker and stretcher are mounted and I have some foot pedals setup. I need to get better about properly testing things as I go. Do to space consideration I shortened the handle the foot pedal controls and lost basically all leverage making it pretty well useless. Nothing a little rework can't fix.

Another thing on my list is improving efficiency in the shop. To that end I've finally gotten around to making a stand for my bead roller. Up till now I've just been chucking it up in the vice, same vice I use for basically everything, including the shrinker/stretcher and English wheel. All tools I tend to use together making for very inefficient work. Now my bead roller at least has it's own roll around stand to be used rarely, but effectively. Plan currently is to add stands off the back for the shrinker and stretcher.

Paint is kind of on my list and since I'm planning to try to paint this car I'm hoping to pick it up pretty quick. Ultimately I don't actually care to get good at paint, as long as I can correct it, and if I can't there's always wraps.

Haha, I don't necessarily, but I love an excuse to learn something. I've been wanting to do more work with aluminum and this seemed like a low stakes way to go about getting some practice. Got me a bunch of practice welding in awkward positions and around funny shapes too.

It ain't exactly pretty, but it fits and is welded.