Day Seven: Lookin’ for deep, penetrating, wide welds…
Day Seven: Beads that penetrate deep and make the factory frame welds that were cut to separate the front and rear of the S10 chassis look like a kindergarten art & crafts project…
Day Seven: The initial graft – the frame in this area will be boxed to further reinforce the frame. Unfortunately, measurements taken after the welds revealed a 3/32 difference in front to rear placement of the frame rails. This is correctable, however, but reinforces the value of doing this type of work on a frame table. This is not the first challenge of this project, and certainly won’t be the last…
Day Eight: Today was not the most exciting day of this project. A whole lot of measuring and leveling and measuring and tweakin’ and swearing (Thomas was not in the shop today) and measuring…
Day Eight: One should never underestimate the difficulty one can experience when attempting to graft two frames together and actually end up with a straight, square result. I will build a frame table for the next project like this…
Day Eight: The rear, shimmed to level, parallel, and damn near square. Final tweaks will bring things in when the cross-members are cut, tacked, and finally welded. Old skool square…
Day Eight: The front, with bumper and shrouds removed, and shimmed to level…
Day Nine: Thomas cutting off original body mounts. We’ll make our own…
Day Ten: I’m grinding the spring mount welds off the Camaro rear axle tube. New mounts will be fabricated and fitted to meet the new location of spring mounts…
Day Ten: We began cutting and welding the frame cross members…
Day Nine: Outside of frame lookin’ good. Next, the inside then spray with a rust protector before boxing the frame…
Day Eleven and Day Twelve: Got the rear end ready to weld/bolt in place. This is during the initial fitting…
Day Twelve: The rear-end will work just fine, although this photo may look skewed, and it is. The rear’s not welded, so the diff and driveshaft are sagged and supported by a jack stand. Tomorrow, we work to get this all welded/bolted in place so it’s a roller again…
