Featured Post

Subscribe!

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Triumph Spitfire Body Repair #18 - Old Frame Assembly

Here's the obligatory video:


As you may be able to figure out from the video, I decided that using the black car's frame was the best way to go. While I still may not go back and re-visit the driver's side door issues and leave well enough alone, I definitely don't want to have the same problem when I attack the passenger's side.

The first order of business was to get the body off the sawhorses and onto the floor so I could get the frame under it so see how it lines up.

Let the body hit the floor, let the body hit the floor...(that's a musical reference).

Another view.

Since the frame was in two pieces, I needed all of the measurements from the workshop manual to get it back together.My initial plan was to mount the two frame pieces to the body and then weld them together. The more I considered this, however, the more I thought that if the body had twisted or was distorted in some way, I would only translate that distortion to the frame and then have a bad base...bad data in gives bad data out, so to speak.

Instead, I put the two pieces on the ground next to each other and tried to get them lined up and fit using the workshop manual measurements (which there are a lot of thankfully). Unfortunately, this wasn't working out for me for reasons that I couldn't figure out (but would eventually).

By this time, though several hours had passed, my son was getting rather bored and his old man was getting frustrated, so I gave it up for the day. I've found that, while I lose valuable time cutting my losses and leaving, I can usually figure the problem out after being away from it for a bit and I also tend not to do anything stupid!

How I left it, to revisit just two days later and figure it out.

No comments:

Post a Comment