The Big Stick-Up

Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing.
Helen Keller

Big day today, we are welding the chassis beams into place and attempting to make one out of two!

Helpful as ever, Dino spent the day here today and we started off by clamping the beams into their final positions beneath Marigold.

Here are the beams in place on Marigold. We were reluctant to actually weld them into their final positions at this time, just in case our measurements were off. They are firmly clamped and ready for the fitting of Kombi 2.

We raised the front of Kombi 2 with a trolley-jack and removed the wheels to give us a range of height adjustment. Then we simply slid the whole thing backwards onto the beams.

It was a bit tighter than we thought and the two halves didn't slide together as easily as we'd hoped. We set up a couple of sash clamps and wound the two halves together, one turn at a time.

 Almost together, if we wind the clamps on both sides together then it's quite easy.

Together at last! The top of Kombi 2 seems to be slightly out of line but the floors line up perfectly. Kombi 2 is rather flimsy without her back end but we'll easily get it all lined up once the lower section has been permanently fixed.

The beams beneath line up perfectly in their respective channels! They shall be firmly re-clamped and welded permanently into place.

We drilled a few 15mm holes through the channel side-walls and have blobbed in some lovely spot welds to hold them in place. They'll get a top and bottom line of weld on the reverse side which will make them pretty permanent. We're out of time and the sun is setting so I'll continue with the preparation during the coming week and then we'll finish the basic structural welding.


Thanks for stopping by
CooP