Mike's Bike is (99.5%) DONE!

I completed nearly everything! I have to make one last trip to Home Depot to pick up one more hex head bolt in 6mmx1.00 thread, since I over estimated the length of one of the needed bolts and need to straighten that out. After that, the only thing left is to source to stainless locking nuts, the kind without the plastic locking insert, since I don't want any heat melting the inserts and allowing the battery tray to drop . . . That would be a bad thing. For sure. Let me show you what I am talking about!

Mockup . . . one of my favorite things. Measuring 2xelventy trillion times, cutting/welding/drilling once. It saves time in the long run!

Here's the battery tray (again):

Here is one of the flanges Dave helped make while I was working on something else:

I had to figure out a way to make those flanges stay on and support the battery tray in a secure manner. Normally, I would try to figure out a way to do so horizontally, but given the low profile and also the requirement to make things easily accessible, I chose to use existing threaded inserts in a clever way.

This is the existing threaded insert:

I simply drilled through the hole with a smaller bit (after centerpunching it to prevent the bit from wandering too much) and ran a tap through the hole and test it with a piece of threaded rod I had:

 Poifect! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!

Here is the basic idea:

With that settled, I had to move on to figuring out how to secure the seat pan. Due to my design of the seat pan, I really only needed to ensure that the seat pan would not pop off the frame rails. The locator pieces lock the seat pan longitudinally, so I just had to make it so that the seat could come off fairly easily but not be accidently popped off.

Here is a view from the underside to refresh our memories of what everything looked like.

Hmmmm . . . That elliptical hole of the frame bracing looks pretty suspiciously well placed . . .

What if I made a plate to cover that, with a hole in the center that would be large enough to fit a stud through it, which would be welded on to the seat pan and then secured with a wing nut? Oh look! A suspiciously perfect stud ready to get welded to the seat pan!

I also took the liberty of cleaning up the edges of the curved section of the seat pan so that it was even all the way around.

Shazam! I distracted you long enough to have made a nice looking place from some stainless I had leftover from the handle of the charcoal started I had assembled for my father for Father's Day:

Now doesn't that look swanky?

Closeups are always good:

Back to the battery tray . . .

Here is one of the hex headed bolts.

Why did I bother with bolts? Well . . . I wanted somethign replaceable. I have seen way too many bolts get stripped out and if I welded something in place, it would make things a lot harder to replace in the future. With a bolt, you can simply unscrew it and replace it with another one. I couldn't find stainless bolts in the right size at Home Despot, so this will certainly do for now.

Here is a shot of how the bolt goes through the threaded insert and the hole that I drilled and tapped for the bolt:

I marked and drilled (intentionally) oversized holes (to allow for ease of installation):

Then noted that the "legs" of the brackets stuck up much too far:

I used a chisel point King Size Sharpie (thought I'd be done mentioning them, didn't you? HAH!) to get an approximation of how much I had to trim off. I fired up the band saw and got to sawing the excess off, cleaning them up on the belt/disc sander and ended up with this:

And then welded them on to the tray:

Not too shabby looking. Not perfect, but pretty decent. A locking nut will complete the kit when I can find some of those things, or Mike can find them, too. I'm not picky. heh

Magic tip time! I wanted to try something with making a spacer to prevent the seat pan from getting pulled too far down with the wing nut. I cut a small piece of 1/2" aluminum rod and evened up the ends. I wanted to drill a hole down the middle of the short section, but attempting to hold that in my fingers would be finger-a-cide, so I came up with a simple but highly effective clamp that gave me enough leverage to prevent the rod section from spinning.

It took a long time to tap this darn thing. I had forgotten my number drill set (you likely have no idea what I am talking about . . . unless you are a machinist or very familiar with drilling and tapping holes), so I didn't have exactly the right twist drill (commonly known as a drill bit, which isn't exactly correct) size on hand to make tapping through that section easy. But I managed. I so wanted a lathe. I would have been done in less than 5 minutes, including all the tool changes. LOL! Oh well . . .

This is what it ended up looking like:

But my measuring was off:

 Remember that whole measure a lot of times and cut/drill/weld once thing? Yeah . . . But, after testing things out, I determined that it wasn't necessary to have the spacer there at all, since the pan is 18g steel, it barely flexes when you crank on the wing nut . . . Next time, I think 20g will be easier and faster to work with. LOL!

Nearly final battery tray installed:

And the final profile view of the seat pan and battery tray on the frame:

It looks really sleek! I can't wait to see how the rest of the bike comes together! Mike's got some good plans. =) 

Due to my injury yesterday, I slept in and had a lazy beginning to my day in my apartment. During the night my cut knit together well. I think the scaring, if any, will be minimal Yay!

I finally got up and out in the afternoon and proceeded to get busy!

Here is a look at the right side of the tail of the frame and the hoop I was working on yesterday:

I shortened up the extra length until the frame rails matched up as closely as I could make them without having something along the lines of a ring roller to correct the radius. What's a fellow to do? Well, with a bandsaw, extra material from the legs I cut down and a welder, there isn't much I can't do!

I sliced a short section of the tube in half and then formed it around the tubing using my handy vise and hammer:

Here is what I ended up with:

The other half I actually squished down until it fit on the inside of the fram rail, then tapped it into place thusly:

Since I had a severe lack of assistants floating around (because I am knee deep in assistants usually. HAH!), I had to use what is left of my brain to hold the hoop in place. When that was shown to be futile due to the fact that brains are squishy and not very good at adhering metal together against the forces of gravity, I found a ratchet strap and used it to lock the hoop into place:

The zip ties are there to keep the strap from slipping off the sides and dropping the hoop as I tapped it into place with the hammer for the next phase of global domi . . . working on Mike's frame. 

The next picture is a bit blurry, but you can clearly see the frame is not exactly round and not lined up as well as I would like:

Here is what I use the other half of the tube I cut up for:

That should fill the gap nicely! I trimmed pieces down and fit them up better, tacked everything into place and then started a lot of welding:

As you can see, I basically covered everything in weld building everything up as smoothly as possible:

It took a while to weld all that in, but I think I did a really decent job! It took about 5 whole minutes with a flap disc to clean it up and get it to look like this:

Not too shabby at all!

I even managed to keep the hoop pretty dead flat with the rest of the frame! 

That is going to make finishing the measurements and eventually the fitup for the seat pan very easy. I like easy, at least when it works. LOL!

Oh! And one last thing:

What hole? Doesn't look like there was every a hole there. =) 

Starting work on the TVR.

So, my first major job that I got through a Craigs List advert is repairing some poorly "repaired" frame damage on a TVR Tasmin 280i. It seems that the 1.5" OD .065" thick support was not stiff enough at a particular joint that ties the front sway, front tie rod and support for the front clip of the body. The one upper diagonal tube was not able to cope with the flexion the joint placed on the tube, as there are about 5 different planes coming together at one point, and not enough triangulation. I'll let the pics (celly phone pics, deal with it) show most of what I had to deal with.

In the first pic below, I've made some initial cuts on the driver's side support tube.

First cuts

It's not lit well, but, that tube with the cuts in it failed exactly opposite the point of triangulation. The hole is actually from a really craptastic weld job that someone tried to do in order to "fix" the problem, but they just blew holes through the tube and made everything worse since water got in and started rusting everything.

Another angle of the same cuts and damage.

 

Nasty hole that surely didn't help keep things in one piece.

 

Here's the passenger side mostly cleaned up. This side was a bit easier. Easier is a very relative term since getting into those areas with a 4.5" grinder was a real pain. It's going to be even more interesting welding the new sections of tube in and also all the re-enforcements. It will be a very good exercise for me. heh

You can see the attempt at triangulation better with this pic, though the perspective is a bit wacky

. 

Driver's side mostly cleaned up. Yes, I knicked the bolt for the sway bar. Oops. 

80's angular goodness. These cars are nicknamed "The Wedges." I'll eventually get some pics of it outside the garage.

That's pretty open in the middle, but not on the sides where I am trying to avoid wires and lines. Welding is gonna be interesting, even with my fancy TIG torch. Oh boy . . . 

The flash blew out the red. It really stands out on the black gel coat (fiberglass body = gel coat) . It's a darn cool logo, I think. 80's goodness, indeed!

That's it for now. I'll be discussing exactly what we need to do with the owner, and he's got some good ideas, too. If anyone knows where to get good deals on small lengths of 1.5"OD .065" wall CroMo tubing, comment or email!