Duplicating the forward chassis was not complicated but was very time consuming. Tight weld joints make for easy, clean work when the welding begins. I worked on this assembly for many, many, many hours:
In the morning I would set a cup of coffee on the assembly and ask “How am I going to do this?” After the day’s work had concluded I ‘d set a cold can of beer on the frame and congratulate myself:
Behold the interlocking rings of Cogitation & Self Congratulation!
This is the complement of pieces I eventually ended up with. Things did not proceed in a linear fashion. I floundered around quite a bit before the plan came together. Initially I thought I would not need a substantial internal support structure. Ideally a welded joint should be as strong as the metals being joined to one another. After carefully cutting and fitting the joints from the new steel to the existing I realized I couldn’t attain the ideal. I’m a good, certified structural welder but joining the old to the new without some reinforcement would not work.
Frame rail step cut
Same joint, frame flipped, new piece tacked in place
The easy fix for a bad joint is called a splice plate. You would weld the joint up, grind it flush and then weld a piece of plate over the joint extending well into both the old and new steel. This is standard practice in steel fabrication. On a restoration of a high value car it wouldn’t fly. I had to contrive some form of interior support.
That’s where the 3″ x 5″ rectangular tube came in:
3″ x 5″ tube steel inserted in frame rails
They fit very nicely, snug. I needed to drive them in.
Now they had to be cut down:
Before
After
Once the pitch was established I trial fit some of the new assembly:
Things should work out. Now to concentrate on the tube stubs:
Raw tube to desired profile
Step one
After trial fitting a few more dozen times I welded them up:
Close enough for iron work.
There was no point in scabbing in little bits of steel. My location, Southeast Michigan, still has a large amount of smaller steel fabrication shops servicing the auto industry, construction, etc. I walked into Lyndon Fabricators, Redford Michigan, with an idea, a handful of sketches and a pocket of money. They were helpful and happy to take on a small project. They provided me with one 4’x10′ sheet of 18 gauge mild steel (for the fabrication of body panels) and one 5’x10′ sheet of 11 gauge mild steel (.120″). They also sheared and bent pieces according to my sketches. The sketches included duplication of the frame rails at the front of the chassis as well as the rear “extension assembly”. The entire bill came to $540.00.
Sourcing a piece of rectangular tube locally was a little more difficult. If you want to buy a ton of the stuff it’s dirt cheap. If you only want 8′ it’s expensive. I never used to have to buy steel; I was an ironworker before retirement and I could get pretty much whatever I wanted for free. (I built an entire 20’x20′ cabin of scrounged steel, maybe a topic for another blog.)
I couldn’t bum what I needed from former employers and local steel suppliers were too expensive. I found a place, Online Metals, that shipped a piece of 3″ x 5″ x 0.12″, 8′ long to my door for $136.62.
Lyndon did a very accurate job fabricating my pieces and it was now up to me to put it all together.
Maybe I could get away by just replacing the forward cross member. If I could pop it loose, leave the frame rails and steering rack mounts, that might do it:
Ouch. This project would both add years to my life and take them off…
When doing a frame off restoration the obvious thing to do is get the frame off. Oddly, this didn’t immediately occur to me.
I pulled the engine first, oil gushing from the rear main seal like the Exxon Valdez had just hit the reef.
I actually began sand blasting the frame before realizing that I was insane.
The car had never been totally reassembled after the last stab at restoration and there wasn’t much holding it together. With the exception of the rear floor area which had been brazed together back in the 1980’s everything else was only loosely bolted to the chassis.
As is often the case it came apart easier than it will go back together. I left the suspension intact to make it easier to move out of the workshop onto the driveway for blasting.
Reversing inertia. Stopping what is started, starting what is stopped. An expectant moment, the pause before the opposite impulse takes hold, the space between inhalation and exhalation, the now for which the meditator strives, the space in which the Buddha is said to reside. Imagine the pistons of the steam engines aboard Titanic stopped, then started in reverse, the triple screws in full reverse trying to halt that big, unsinkable man made box from colliding with nature.
On a purely physical level my situation with Old Number 818650BW is less dramatic. Jack her up, bull her around, drag her onto a trailer and drive her to a new location for resurrection. Perhaps because of my enthusiasm she came out of the barn more easily than she went in.
On an emotional level restarting a stalled project after thirty-five years requires an intellectual and psychological examination of how and why I piloted this car into the iceberg of stasis to begin with. That’s where the inertia really lay: inside my head.
I was happy to see her on a trailer. It was a first step; it was action, and action can feel good. Just breaking her loose from that barn was an accomplishment. A barn is no place for a car; barns are for horses and hay. A car in a barn is not a happy car.
It was a festive, exciting day. After she was all bowsed down on the trailer, sunshine warming up the old body panels I grabbed a coffee, jumped in the cab of the tow vehicle and popped the lever into D. The trailer’s wheels broke friction and me and that old car were moving again …
Please consider this: The Holy Grail of the classic auto enthusiast, the deliquescent, rodent infested Jaguar XK slumped in the barn of some crazy old man who is “gonna fix ‘er up some day…”
The sorriest thing about this particular scenario is that the barn is mine, the car is mine and I am that crazy old man.
Some Day finally came. I was wandering the grounds of Greenfield Village http://www.thehenryford.org during the 2014 Motor Muster, arm and arm with the woman for whom I had been looking-mostly in the wrong places-for the past forty years and finally discovered hiding in an online dating site.
If you’re a Car Nut and find yourself in Southeastern Michigan the third weekend of June go to the Motor Muster. It’s a really big show, autos scattered over the grounds of Greenfield Village, Henry Ford’s collection of historic buildings, worth a visit on its own. The setting is idyllic, relaxing. It’s not all smoking hot and blistering pavement as the Woodward Dream Cruise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodward_Dream_Cruise two months later usually is. The cars are grouped by year rather than make so one can get a perspective on what various automakers were offering at the same time.
In the 1938 area of the show there were these little Bantam Roadsters:
Apparently the Great Depression had worked wonders in the area of weight reduction.
But not for everyone. By 1941 other people were fat and happy and needed great big cars to tote themselves and their money around:
By the 1950’s the world was pretty much exhausted from the double whammy of the Great Depression and World War II. Wartime manufacturing had shifted back to producing consumer goods and Americans were content.
The 1950’s area of the car show was heavy on stolid, Eisenhower Era vehicles, beautiful from a perspective of 60 years on, their ponderous, utilitarian demeanor shrouded by a comforting fog of nostalgia. Many of them were sweet, lovely, in a bobby-sox and saddle shoe kind of way. Like Veronica and Betty from an Archie comic book. The automotive equivalents of the kind of nice girl your Mom would wish you to marry.
And then there was this:
And this:
A design risen from the ashes of a country that had recently been bombed to near oblivion, a graceful, racy shape evocative of a British fighter plane blended with the civilized interior appointments one would expect of a country house drawing room.”I have one of these,” I mentioned to Lisa. We had only been together for a year or so and there were things we didn’t know about one another yet.
“No way,” she said, “one of these?” The question has been settled for years: women with good taste like sexy cars.
“Well, yeah and no. The green one is an XK 120 OTS, Open Two Seater. This one is an XK 140 OTS. Mine is a 140 Drop Head Coupe. The main difference is mine is all torn apart.”
“I guess that means you have to get your ass to work and put it back together then, doesn’t it?” She pulled me a bit more tightly to her side. That’s one reason I had been looking for her for forty years…
Time to hitch up the old tow bar again…
Car in Tow 
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