HOW TO DO IT YOURSELF ON A BUDGET If you’re restoring a vehicle, a major milestone in the process is when you paint the vehicle. At that stage, although still far from finished, the project really starts to take shape. Depending on your skill level and ambition, you may wish […]
Tag: Hot Rod
How to Make Perfect Notches in Tubing
If you’re looking to fabricate your own exhaust roll bar or even go-kart chassis you need the professional tubing notcher from Eastwood. It’s a great tool if you’re restoring a car, drag racing, or off-roading. You can make notches in 3/4″ to 3″ OD tubing. It can be mounted directly to your workbench or in a vise and it accepts standard hole saws. The notcher is adjustable up to 50 degrees by loosening one bolt. The one hand operation is great because it allows you to get the perfect angle and tighten the bolt without another person helping. Many tubing notches require two bolts to be tightened which means you need three hands and maintain the exact angle while adjusting and tightening the bolts.
How to make Flexible Brake Line Mounts using the Eastwood Vise Press Brake
When building a custom classic car you may want to upgrade or customize your brake system and this may require starting from scratch with how you mount and run your brake lines. There are a lot of options for off the shelf kits and parts but I’ve found that they still need modification or you need to make all new parts anyways. One such simple part are tabs for where your hard brake line meets your soft or flexible brake line. I build a lot of older Fords that never came with hydraulic brakes from the factory. This means I need to design and figure out the entire braking system when upgrading to hydraulic brakes. Something as simple as brake line tabs need to be considered. I decided to show my simple solution for brake line tabs front flexible lines on a hot rod or street rod.
When do you save a panel or throw it away? Repairing a Rusty Trunk Lid
When your fabrication and welding skills start to progress you’ll get to a point where not much scares you as far as repair goes. Whether it’s rust or just old body damage anything can be fixed with enough time and skills. Over the past few years I’ve started to get myself to that point where I often have to approach a rusty panel with the question “Is it worth my time to fix it?”. The answer can differ for many reasons. Is the panel easily available aftermarket or good used? How expensive are the panels? How soon do I need it versus how long it takes to get a replacement part?
Making a Custom Spoon Gas Pedal for a Channeled Hot Rod
I’ve heavily modified a set of Ford F1 pedals to work in my channeled car that involved shortening, heating and bending, and reshaping the curves to fit into the car. Now I needed to fit the “GO” pedal in between the transmission tunnel, the pedals, and the steering column tube. I’ve seen some guys put a step in their tunnel and rest their heel on the tunnel but it just doesn’t “flow” like I’d like. Don’t get me wrong that method is very function-able, but I wanted a pedal that was correct looking and flowed into the provided space without having to cut up my nice tunnel I made a few months ago.
How to Fabricate a Cowl Panel From Scratch
I somehow ended up with this ’29 Model A Roadster carcass I want to build a little replica-racer out of. It was cheap, the bones were there and I figured I could build it up when I found some non-existent free time. I’m a little stubborn and although I could buy an entire new steel replica body, or all of the panels new to make this car all solid again, I’d rather build the panels I need from scratch and bring a close to 90-year old car back from the dead for very little money out of my pocket. I decided I wanted to start in the front of the body and work my way back. The side cowl panels are almost ALWAYS rotted out on the bottom of these cars and after I looked at the remains of the originals I decided I could easily tackle making new panels for only a few bucks in sheet metal.
Fitting a bench Seat into a Channeled Hot Rod
Channeling an early 30’s car looks the cat’s meow but it creates ALL sorts of problems with actually making the car drivable inside. Every step of this project I’ve had to take a step back and figure out how to fit everything into the car with the decreased room inside. Because the transmission and driveshaft tunnel protrude up above the floor now I couldn’t just put the seat up on top of the tunnel or I’d have my head up out of the roof. I needed to get the driver and passengers butts as close to the floor as possible.
How to Tighten up a Weld Seam on a Patch Panel.
No one’s perfect, but we can do our best to strive to get the closest we can get to perfection every day. These ideals are the same whether you’re a cook, a machinist, a landscaper, or a guy in his garage building an old car or motorcycle. One big lesson I’ve learned over the past few years has been to slow down and take the time to make sure that parts fit together as nice as possible before welding. Just blindly rough cutting a piece and trying to make it fit another piece is going to end with an uneven weld seam and won’t end well!
Tech Tip- How to Move a Bent Edge
On my Model A project I channeled the car down over the chassis which required me to build new floor supports and pans. The way I built it all up I needed to make 6 small pans that would fit down in between each supports. This meant I had to nail the bends on either edge so the final inside measurement allowed the pans to drop down in between the supports tightly. I will have to take the pans in and out throughout the rest of the project so I wanted them to drop in and fit snug, but not so tight I needed to use a hammer to force them in (this could also bow the panel).