Inner Fender Bracing

Here's the factory inner fender brace, a pretty weak piece...  A few vendors, such as XV, sell additional bracing pieces to reinforce this area, but they are designed to be installed under the factory brace. I want to run my car as low as possible and lower braces would present clearance issues with the front tires. So I decided to make my own replacements for the factory piece.

 Cut it off. Note the bracing to make sure everything stays in place during cutting/welding.

 Plasma cutting the reinforcement plates for the cowl/firewall. I love this machine!

 Both sides of the fender/shock tower brace get boxed.

 Using the mill to lighten the new 25x50mm RHS braces.

All welded up. This should make this area nice and strong, while leaving adequate clearance for the front tires. On to the other side!

Workshop buddies

the Kuda Trailer...

Here's how I get the kuda project from place to place. Works great, even hooked up the rear lights.

Radiator frame / front rail support

Fabricating a 50x50mm 3mm wall RHS support for the front chassis rails / radiator support.

Rolled sections of 3mm steel.

Subframe Connectors

I decided to go with 50x75mm RHS bar through the floor for the subframe connectors.  This shot shows where the floor is cut to allow the bar to slide into the rear chassis rails.

The rear frame rail opened up, cleaned out, holes drilled for plug welds, and rust proofed.

Plasma cut 3mm plate for the torsion bar crossmember mount. This design reinforces the torsion bar anchor as well.

The bar needs to be narrowed to fit into the rear chassis rails...

...as well as have an angle added as E Body rear rails aren't parallel with the chassis.

The joins were beveled, welded right through, then ground smooth.

The finished connector, rustproofed and ready to go in.

All welded up.

Quick concept image of the Beck Kustoms Kuda.

Some more of the rust repairs.

Not bad...  Nothing a light skim of filler can't make perfect.

Cut the old rusty trunk floor out...

One of the patches.

All welded up!

Just starting the stitch welding of the seams. Lots of work getting rid of all the old sealer and crap, in order to get a good weld. I plan to stitch the whole body together, as part of the reinforcing work I'm doing to the car. Nearly everything short of a roll cage!

colours of the cuda...

Here's a close up shot where I've sanded the body back to show the various paint jobs the car has had over its life. On the left is bare steel, and to the right you can see the different layers of paint. First is red primer, then its factory shade of FY1 Lemon Twist yellow. Then over the years it got painted (with grey primer in between each) black, then white, then purple, and then the black that I added soon after I bought the car...  A rainbow of history!

Workspace

360º view of the big studio at Weta Workshop where I am fortunate enough to have a little space for working on the kuda. I've blurred out any Top Secret stuff, so you can stop searching for hobbits! There's probably a bunch of ninjas in the shot though...

 A selection of holes.

 Patched! Including new 4 speed transmission tunnel.

Everything gets fully welded. The old trans tunnel was pretty beat up!

some work so far

Sandblasting in the garage. Did a few full loads of sand through the blaster, it took ages to collect and sift the sand, worked out it would take too long to do the whole front clip. Got a great price from a local blasters, so got them to do it.

The kuda trailer, ready to go to the bodyshop to get the front straightened out and some new steel put in.

On the autorobot. New inner fenders and left hand chassis rail.  The whole front was shunted over, and twisted. They de-stitched the cowl and patched the rust in that area too. Now I've something to aim for with my repairs.

At Weta Workshop in our studio. This is where a bunch of miniatures for Lord of the Rings were built, as well as a great deal of other exciting projects.

Starting the rust repairs. Spoiled with machines nearby, plasma-cam, roller, folder, drill press, etc...  Cheers Weta!

Passenger footwell. I made patch templates in cardboard, then scanned and redrew them on the computer as vector files.

Which I then cut on the Plasma cutter.

I decided to try pressing the swages in. So I cut a couple of templates and a die. It worked pretty well, but as I was only clamping a relatively small area around the swage, the metal warped and buckled quite a bit and needed a decent massage before being ready to weld in.

 

the latest concept image for the kuda. with widened police wheels, and california plate.

440

440ci big block mopar

parts

the 440