Well, Quin really put things in perspective so we've given up on this project and had it hauled off for scrap.
Actually it's just the usual summer slump for car work around here. Senior is always off sitting by the lake and I've been spending all my time on my dirt bike. But, there's some first hint of color in the trees which means it's almost time to hole up and knock out a bunch of work in the coming months.
We have not been completely stalled, just picking away at it 2hrs here 2hrs there. The focus has been on the tailgate. The tailgate is like the crux of why I want the thing (bike hauling), but it definitely added some extra layers of complexity! Really all we've done lately was dedicate an unexpected amount of time (gotta be like 20 man hours?) into making the top rail piece for the tailgate. A lot of the other stuff has worked out as planned, but this one took a real turn from our initial guess and took a lot of tweaking to get it to work out.
When we had the steel pieces bent for the car we had a piece bent for the tailgate rail that was just a straight 90*. Thought was it'd come up off the tailgate facade where the hatch window once was then land on top of the 1" tube making the actual gate frame. Well two big problems there: a) the top side of the 90 was too short to reach the frame, b) the tailgate ain't flat in any direction, so it needed to be curved like the bed rails and the 90* angle doesn't work once it's laid up against the hatch.
The first step was to open up the bend so when laid at the angle of the tail gate the top edge would end up flat. It sounds easy but a 4' section of press bent 14 gauge steel doesn't respond easily to the basic hand tools we're working with here. We beat the living **** out of the thing which did nothing but make our ears ring, then ended up getting it glowing hot with a torch and smacking the bend face down. This got it moving but we started cupping the flats and turning the thing into a pretzel. I gotta admit I had pretty much given up on it but Senior was stubborn on it and after a lot of heat-beat-repeat we had gotten it in the neighborhood. Keep in mind this is using a plumber's torch, a dead blow, ball peen, a 2x6 and a concrete floor. Jesse James Monster Garage we are not...
Getting the curve in was at least straightforward, just made a bunch of cuts so it was all wobbly and took the shape.
As you can see it's still short of the frame so needs to be extended. It also sits too far inward of the rest of the hatch when sitting up in the window channel. Remember all the blabbing about maintaining the 'step' body line from the quarter panel to bed rail? Trying to do the same thing here. In order to space it out we cut some strips of steel and stacked them to get the step we wanted then welded them all together and to the piece. Then used some scrap to extend the top, flat portion of the rail.
Notice something off with my driver's side bed rail?
We didn't at first, then as we were working on this I realized somehow when we were working our way down it welding we got a twist in it which was really noticeable. This was not gonna work for me. I ended up making a big slit up the inside of the rail so we could pull the top section up to the right angle, add spacer and weld back in place. Voila, all fixed!
Ok cool, piece is made! Time to install it permanently. You can see we were just using some through bolts to hold the rail onto the top of the hatch frame while we worked. We needed to turn these into studs.
counter sink
drop a bolt in
a quick zap
studly
For the final installation I used a liberal dose of 3M 08115 Panel Bonding Adhesive and two became one.
Now we can mount the facade to the steel frame permanently, then tied the top of the rail into the frame, bend and cap off the back of the bed rails, etc.
One more tail gate related thing in the works too. For now, pics provided without explanation
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Concept
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