Commence the welding!

It was a beautiful Saturday morning, and what better to do then fire up the welder and begin fusing the metals with some gas metal arc welding. But in more important news, after weeks of being taunted for missing build days to transplant raspberry bushes, Danielle brought a delicious peace offering of mini raspberry cheesecakes. If you weren't here for them, you missed out. Just look how good they look!


Yeah I had eaten one already...anyways, back to the car. My big brother, and Chump, Jeff, came over to start the welding. We had tack welded the halo inside the car, and surprisingly, we were able to take them out together. So he started welding the Halo to the main hoop, then we started adding the diagonal cross bars. We decided to give our fat pig car some extra rollover protection with a second diagonal brace.


The el Jeffe had to hop in the car to weld some of the horizontal back braces. We could have pulled it all back out, but he wanted to see if he could weld himself into the car. Unfortunately I wasn't quick enough on grabbing the camera to document his climb out the back window.


Another shot of the horizontal back bars. We're contemplating lowering the driver seat, which means we might need to add another bar for the seat belts, but we'll see.



Then we got to welding in the front down tubes. To get access to the top side of the weld, we had to plinthe box them, so we could remove the boxes and tip the cage down. Now I just need to build the finished versions of those plinthes, and we'll get those welded in, and the cage welded to the car. We also have a dash support bar ready, but decided to hold off on welding it in yet. But now that the down tubes are welded, we can finish cutting and fitting the door bars. They should be ready to weld in next weekend.


Soren climbed into the front wheel wells to get the new calipers, rotors and brake lines installed.


Don't they look hot? Nice aluminum, four pot calipers save us 4lbs per caliper, but it turns out the bigger LS400 rotors weigh 5lbs more. Doh! Oh well, we'll have some much improved stopping power, for basically the same cost as stock parts. Woot! We also picked up our first sponsor, Frozen Rotors, for a discount on cryogenically treated brake rotors, but we're saving those rotors until we get the race pads.


Next week we'll be back at some small projects, like putting in the braided brake lines in the rear, and flushing the brake system with new high temp fluid. Hopefully the tires will be installed by then and the car will be able to move under its own power. But the weekend of May 1st will be another big build day with lots of projects. We'll probably even start earlier then usual, so if you're a Chump, watch for that invite. Catch you Chumps on the flip-side!