Hello but I'm not building a Haynes roadster, quite

[Davey]

I had a few hours at the TIG set this morning gluing the bits of my inlet fanimold together till I ran out of rods . Anyway here's a couple of photos of my dodgy welding, it aint pretty but the fanimold will need some attention from a die grinder and a flap wheel when its all glued together anyway.

D.

[Davey]

Its been a fairly quiet week at work so I've managed to get all the fanimold bits stuck together at last after a new consignment of ali welding rods arrived. I have to say I am well chuffed with the TIG welder, despite it only having a claimed 60% duty cycle it hasn't cut out once, produces nice clean welds and with the foot pedal is super controllable.

I did quite a bit of cleaning up of it all yesterday with a borrowed die grinder and carbide bit then switched to my cheapo Dremel type rotary tool to polish it all up. It was all going swimmingly till 3 pm when the rotary tool suddenly lost power, I looked down to the main unit to see it glowing and unhealthy colour and pouring with smoke. So I chopped the plug off and went out and bought another!

Going in today to do some more polishing and hopefully will have a couple of photos for your delectation later.

D.

[Bonzo]

I missed those photos when you posted them mate

Certainly got a nice bit of penetration going on there & I must say, I do agree with your assesment of those inverters.
They do seem to have plenty of power in reserve for the heavier material .... I did slice open that bit of 5mm plate I used, a good 75-80% penetration, very good in view of the fact that I was not using that much power

Look forward to viewing the completed manifold mate

Been looking at that combined folder/roll/shear on the Northern Tools website, the current price is very good & I am growing ever more tempted
Could almost pay as much that for one of those lightweight Clarke angle iron type folders !!

[Davey]

Cheers Ronnie, your new website is looking interesting. I look forward to following it.

Attached should be three photos of the fanimold after initial welding and as it is currently. The third picture is a bit glary but it shows how I've built up "buttresses" around the fixing holes 'cos they were too close to the sides of the transfer tubes to allow for bolt heads. I've built them up with weld, drilled them through then I'll mill the tops flat and use cap headed bolts to fix it. There's still loads of tidying up and polishing to do but its coming along nicely.

I'll leave it up to you lot to decide if its a candidate for automotive porn or would be better consigned to the scrap bin and get Ronnie to do it properly .

D.

[Bonzo]

That manifold is coming along nicely

You have done well for such an intricate part .... A lot of folk under estimate the degree of difficulty on a project such as this, what with ever changing angles & material thicknesses .... not to mention dissimilar alloy types

That is going to look the dogs danglys one you have lightly fettled & polished it all up. ,
I am sure once you have finished the manifold it will look every bit the part as a several hundred quid, off the shelf part ( Assuming you could get one in the first place )

I am hoping to have a crack at my inlet manifold in the next week or so.

Really must get Junior to do some update work to my site .... Not been touched for ages

Well done mate

[Davey]

Cheers Ronnie, I'm pretty pleased with it so far. I seem to recall someone asked me if I could make him one a few pages back, trouble is the time its taking, about 40 hours spent on it so far . Of course a second one should be faster and they can do the cleaning up and polishing themselves which would save a load of time so it might still be possible. One for a four cylinder motor would be lots easier though.

D.

[Davey]

Well I've hardly had a chance to touch the Dragon since I did the inlet manifold over a month ago and its been bugging me so as we were quiet this afternoon I decided to have a play around with my pedals. I'm going for a top mounted pedal setup, for one thing I think it will be more comfortable with my size 12s and it also puts the brake master cylinder higher up so it should be easier to bleed, well that's the theory anyway.

I mocked the pedal box and pedals up first in 5mm plywood to see how it would all sit and how long the pedals need to be to give a comfortable position then I marked up the main pedal arms for brake and clutch onto some 5mm steel plate before gas cutting them out and dressing them up. Next I cut the pedal plates which are now waiting for dressing. I may get time tomorrow to cut the throttle pedal and finish dressing all the bits up ready for welding. The brake pedal arm may need a slight crank to allow it to clear the steering column.

Sorry no photos yet, maybe when its all sorted if it works out ok I'll take some .

D.