HJ47 welcome here? (1 Viewer)

[Henry James the 47th]

I'm much happier with the dash after yesterday's worrisome repairs turned out the way they did. The 'pocket' is going to be white inside.

 

[Henry James the 47th]

last two. Next up are the windshield frame and the bib, and, of course, the plastic will need to be applied to the cab in many spots. I see a lot of elbow grease ahead.

 

[ColoCruiserJeff]

Those are beautiful!!!

Very nice work!

You're keeping quite a few of us motivated here....keep the pics comming!

 

[Henry James the 47th]

I decided to drill holes and weld captive nuts to the lower edge of the recently modified rh fender (or 'mudguard' for those folks out there in the outer reaches) so that a rubber spray skirt could be installed, as on the LH fender.

 

[Henry James the 47th]

A couple more of the fender, and then one of the now scuff-sanded bib, ready for primer

 

[Henry James the 47th]

Then back to work on the tub, flipped upside down. The first task was straightening out the lines along the edges, which involved judicious use of the hammer and car jack.

 

[Henry James the 47th]

3 more

 

[Henry James the 47th]

another set. I managed, through a series of vicious slams to the metal, to get the floor pan around the parking brake lever mounting, where the center support for the seats (visible on the interior of the cab) had been previously shoved down (god only knows what precipitated that) and the floor bend was poor looking. It actually came out pretty well, though these photos aren't too helpful at showing that. That was a section of the floor pan that I've been wanting to correct for a while.

 

[Henry James the 47th]

next set of pictures, this time with the flash off.

 

[Henry James the 47th]

While my friend Mark continued with the painting of the bib, windshield frame, the pedal bucket, and the fuel separator cover, I trundled the cab back to the welding room to "take care of" a couple of pinholes, and a small crack I noticed when the cab was upside-down. As you can see in the third picture, those two little pinholes turned into a welding nightmare.

 

[Henry James the 47th]

I had tried to leave as much of the original floor in place when I patched it, and now I have come to regret this, well-intentioned as it may have been.

When the factory stamps out the floor section, I have noticed (because I've chopped up sections of 40 floor on more than one truck now) that the metal gets either compressed or stretched in various places. Where it has been stretched thinner, and then gets some surface corrosion, the metal gets pretty thin, a condition which describes very well the curved bit of metal along the back of the footwell. Add onto that some welds in the immediate area, and subsequent grinding down of the welds, and I ended up with some very thin sheet metal in spots - like the spot with the two little pinholes. As I tried to repair it it got worse and worse, the pinholes turning into a crevasse, and new cracks precipitating where I tried my best to fix things. It just started getting really ugly by late Friday afternoon, so I stopped.

I slept on it, and the next morning came back and patched in a new piece of floor metal, something I should have done in the beginning. Actually, strike that - TWO new pieces!

 

[Henry James the 47th]

three more. How I love welding the floor of this cab - it's sorta become a hobby of mine

 

[Henry James the 47th]

Three hours later, after an initial optimistic estimate of 1 hour, the floor was better than before by far.

 

[Henry James the 47th]

Hopefully, some more priming will be completed by the end of today, which will mean a whole lotta scuff sanding coming up for me..

 

[Henry James the 47th]

For the moment, I am ahead of the painter and have lots of stuff scuffed for him to prime.

 

[Henry James the 47th]

the hood is now scuff sanded and ready to get primed

 

[Henry James the 47th]

I have been puzzling for weeks over how to sort out the mounting for the winch onto the bumper, and finally realized that my previous modification to the fairlead plate wasn't quite the right way to go, so I cut the piece off and scrounged up a piece of L-angle iron which would finally make it easy to cleanly attach the fairlead/pto winch support plate to the bumper.

 

[Henry James the 47th]

I will make this a bolted assembly, instead of welding the angle iron in, as this makes future mods a little easier and is plenty strong with 3 bolts attaching to the bumper, and 5 bolts holding the angle iron to the fairlead plate. The angle iron is now cleaned up and smoothed, and awaiting epoxy primer.

 

[Henry James the 47th]

sanding moving along, piece by piece, and then hanging for the painter. The doors had some heinous black tar adhesive remains on them, which involved a lot of work with a putty knife to slice most of it off, and then another round of media blasting which finally got it all off. One door is going to need some tweaking, becasue its a little twisted. That will have to wait until the trial assembly, which is coming up pretty quick now

 

[Henry James the 47th]

Just got the newly keyed-alike door locks back from the local locksmith.

It looks like the painter Mark will be applying some epoxy primer tomorrow. I've only got the roof to prep now and that will be all of it for round one primer.