Scratch Build – Complete ⭐ Spirit of Motion

I can suggest to do some research aboit old americans motors to see how they done. In my point of view, that's the continuity of your classir car mod !

Or you just can use Black rigids électrics cables whithout sleeving...

 

Or you can go full throttle and finish the case in a flashy hotrod style.

 

Y'all covered the whole spectrum of options. It got me thinking about all the possibilities though!

There is almost no RGB or lighting inside this case, and nearly everything internally is black and red. So I'm thinking I need to bring in some color in the way of sleeving via a combination of red and black. 2/3 being black probably.

 

Life has been wild. Travel for work pulled me away for a week and naturally the kitchen would flood while away.

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Keeping my two little boys mostly out of the demo/construction area and washing dishes in the bathtub are some of the new fun activities I've been occupied with

I carved enough space out in the garage by my water damaged cabinets to get back to work on the scratch build in my free time again so expect an update this weekend!

 

Ow. I see this a lot. I hope that's not plywood floor. As for the cabinets, if they are prefab, I usually have to rebuild the particle board structure, and mount the real wood facade on that.

 

@Cheapskate The majority of that sub floor will have to be removed and replaced still. The damage was bad enough (and the existing cabinets were a low enough quality ) it looks like all cabinets are going to be outright replaced with new units Silver lining to the months we'll be without a kitchen maybe

 

You would be amazed how much pine planking you can buy for the cost of a single section of those crappy prefabs.

 

Back with an update on the build!

It is time to start working on the grill portion of the build again. The spine and individual grill pieces were all filed to fit one another tightly the last time I worked on the grill. So before I can weld them together I need to polish the top, bottom, and back of each grill since it will be impossible to do this after welding.

I started with the inside of grills. This doesn't need a full polish so I went ahead and left this all a brushed finish. The grit was 120. I used some bee wax on the sand paper every once in a while to really extend the life I got out of the paper by limiting how much it gummed up (If you have sanded much aluminum you know the struggle I'm talking about). I was able to get all the sanding done with a single sleeve.

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Because most of the material I'm sanding is only 1/4" thick I grabbed a couple pieces of wood to use as spacers so that I could utilize as much of the sleeve as possible. It did make the process a little bit slower but I didn't want to waste so much of the sleeve.

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I think it will be almost hard to notice that the inside is not polished like the rest and it saved me a tremendous amount of time by not having to polish out the additional material.

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Time for the real time consumer work of getting these ready for welding. Polishing

The fronts will all be shaped and polished after welding and assembly is complete so I just needed to polish the top and bottom of each grill and the complete spine.

I started by doing some some prep with both sand paper and some of those fiber discs in a die grinder. It was 150 grit paper (wet sanding) and the discs were medium and fine grades. The aluminum is the cheapest 6061 I could get so there are some defects and scratches that needed persuaded out.

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Next up was hours and hours of work at the grinder that don't lend themselves to interesting photos very well haha

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After some testing I had to make a choice on how far to take the polish because you can really lose yourself in days of polishing if you commit to a mirror polish and so many pieces. Since you will not see direct reflections on the top and bottom surfaces of the grills I could also not worry a tremendous amount. I settled on a polish that gave me a reflection of something like a blurry mirror for these surfaces so I used a spiral sewn sisal buffing wheel and black emery polishing compound. The outside surfaces of the grill will get a more serious polish.

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Because of the cheap aluminum and some damage from the waterjet cutting, there are some small marks and scratches on most of the pieces that are just not going to come out unless the piece was remade. I honestly kind of like them as they look a ton like mild pitting and marks that you see on old chrome! They will give you the relief of not crying when the computer is whacked or scratched later in life lol

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I 3D printed some little spacers so I could load these polished pieces into the spine and hold them all at the appropriate spot. These will hopefully hold up the the heat of the welder long enough that I can get tack welds before they soften.

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I only assembled up the this point because I need these welded first. I can then shape the ends of them to match the curve of the main case body.

 

OMG!!!!!!! Man, you're crazy! Yeah, it`s perfectly!

 

I love the beaten look! Will add a lot of character to the build . Amazing work as always

 

You can buff the assembled grill, it will just be insanely tedious.

 

Thank you. I'm just having fun!

You're probably right. It will make it more interesting to look at for sure

I already have a blurred vision of the line between can and should haha

 

Thats a cool sanding machine, I thought the brushed surface finish straight off the sander looked great, although the beaten polished looks sweet too, if your going for that kind of theme

 

The spindle sander is such a cool sander when the need crops up. It was a harbor fright sale where I picked it up, and I don't use it enough to probably ever wear it out so I'm really happy with it!

I really like the brushed finish as well it just doesn't fit the 1930s chrome grill look I'm shooting for in this build

 

Alrighty, I got the chance to use a welder so I could tack all the lower grills to the spine. I am not skilled at TIG welding so this isn't what good welds look like but they are effective all the same . I would really like to get more practice TIG welding aluminum!

I put the 3D printed spacers in and they worked only if I tacked the grills pretty quickly. If I heated the grill much the PLA plastic would soften which wasn't a huge deal but was annoying as I had to check my spacing periodically. I don't want to have to be bending my welds into shape later on.

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Once I got the top of each grill tacked to the spine I could lay the entire assembly down and get the under side of each piece as well. (The weld with black around it is because I touched the tungsten to the pool of molten aluminum right as I was finishing my weld. The weld is fine )

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Considering that's a really awkward place to weld, I'd say you did great.

 

Well thank you! Appreciate that

 

So with the lower half welded I need to shape the ends of the individual grills to match the contour of the main chassis.

The 3D prints didn't hold up to the heat of welding well and they deformed a little. My spacing between grills is 1/2" and 1/4" conveniently though so I cut some scrap MDF I had into little squares to use as spacers between each grill.

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I set up some foam to hold the assembly upside down and fit the MDF squares into the grill followed by painters tape as a clamp, squeezing the grill tight. The lower most grill had a weld that needed to simply be filed flat before shaping the contour could begin.

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I measured the height of the half grill with the spacers and it measured over sized unfortunately at just over 11-3/8". It should be 11-1/4" to match the main chassis height so I set to sanding each spacers just slightly to lover the overall height evenly. After a round of sanding on each side, the height was nice and the grill fit nicely over the chassis.

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With the spacing all set I slid the half welded grill along side the chassis, placed my grill end cap (this is what the grill ends will be welded to), and traced the curve along the face of the grills so I could simple grind them up to those lines for a nice tight fit.

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I started the shaping process with an angle grinder that had a flapper wheel attached. It was 40 grit I believe. It wasn't fun and felt clunky to handle so I was uncomfortable, thinking I may mess up since the wheel didn't grind very predictably.

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So I switched to a belt sander with some 60 grit paper and it went much better for me. It was a little slower I think but I felt like I had more control over the material being removed and it felt a little safer to boot lol

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It is coming along and it is great to see the build emerging!

 

Incredibly original and elegant, this front grill is a masterpiece