Thanks Achim!
Yesterday I’d said I needed to make a few more sheet metal parts, but I decided to do just one more before I started putting some of them together. So, I did. And here are the Fuel Bunker Inside pieces:
With that, I was ready to start assembly.
This did not go as quickly as I thought. I spent several hours working out a method to hold the pieces in place AND being able to clamp it onto the mill to make the holes. I tried various clamps at different angles, like this attempt:
But the problem kept being that I couldn’t make it fit on the mill. One of the problems with having small equipment.
When I finally got there, I ended up using double-sided sticky tape to hold the Platform Underframes in place, and then cut a piece of 1”x1/4” HRS to use for a clamp. This worked great, and maintained registration while I drilled the mounting holes.
Then I bent the Platform Underframes, and bolted them in place.
With the Platform height set by the Platform Underframe pieces, I decided to bend one part of the Fuel Bunker Rear sheet; the 1/8” tab that provides support to the platform.
The problem here was that using my break, I couldn’t bend the middle part without bending the outside edges. So I came up with using the Sherline mill vise. This worked quite well!
That is, until I went to take it out of the vise, and I found that I’d bent the sheet metal over the clamping screw.
Took me a while to get out of that one without damaging my part!
Here’s where the Fuel Bunker Rear will go eventually.
But, before I can do that, I needed to Rivet the platform to the Platform Underframe. Again, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to devise a method to hold everything square while I drilled the rivet holes through the frames.
Here’s what I came up with: A piece of wood, carefully cut to the exact correct size, carefully squared up, then used more of that double-sticky tape to hold all the pieces in reference to each other until they could be clamped on the mill.
Here’s the top of my setup:
And the bottom (just for fun):
Then I clamped it on the mill table. You can just see the toe of the clamp sticking out from behind the Irwin clamps. The two Irwin pistol-grip clamps are just to help the sticky tape hold the frame pieces in place during drilling.
After drilling all the rivet holes, I then proceeded to rivet the platform to the frames. This went fairly quickly (well, it took me about 90 minutes to do 36 rivets (only having to re-do one of them!).
And even the underside doesn’t look too bad.
Then I mounted it on the horn plates.
That’s my progress for the long weekend. It’s been a fun run, but I think it will be a bit before I get back out to the shop.
Thanks for looking in,
Kim