Pan work

Next on the agenda was starting work on the pan.

What started out as an innocent looking, and quite good swingaxle pan....

Had the torsion tubes narrowed 3 inches per side:

And then the torsion housing / frame horns were cut off altogether, and welded to a 5mm plate for a 4 inch raise.  Much measuring and shimming was done prior to tacking the housing back on.  Our standard high tech PSR "fabrication and metal adjustment tools" are shown in the first picture!:

Measuring diagonals after the welding showed all was well - nice and straight.  Lots of addtional welding has been done to this area since, these are just shots of the initial work.

At some point around this time, the framehead was pie cut and laid back 8 degrees to provide castor without needing to add shims.  I cannot find pics of the pie cut, but this is after bending the frame head back and welding it up.  Front beam is adjustable & narrowed 4 inches total:

As you can see, the triangular sheetmetal panels from the framehead to the pan have been cut away also, they weren't really serving any purpose and made bending the framehead back just that bit easier...

Rear guards were also marked out and the body cut to raise the guards approx 4 inches.  Here's a couple of the body and pan reunited after the torsion housing raise.  The plate used for the raise still needed a fair bit of attention in terms of shaping, final welding & tidy up, but that's all to come.  For now, it's in - time for a couple of beers:

The starting point...

So in 2008 I went to the VW Portland drags, about a 6 hour drive away.  Seeing the awesome time some of my friends were having, I was really keen to get out there and have some fun, so of course on the drive home I was thinking of what I could do to make it happen....

I had a reasonable 58 shell in the back yard, which I thought I could cut up a bit to lighten it, build a small turbo motor to get the thing going quick, and keep the whole thing relatively mild as a part time street / drag car.  Oh how the plan has "evolved"!!!

This is what I started with:

Progress was very slow at this stage due to other committments, but once every blue moon I would get a chance to get out there and cut a bit more out of it, these first shots cover about the first year!

Then in early 2011, things changed a little, I sold my house and was moving into a house with a much smaller yard and shed - I just didn't have the room for it.  I was really close to sending the shell off to scrap, until a conversation with Aaron along the lines of "look - how about we cut some more off it, send it off to be dipped, then it can go to my place and we can build it there.  We can probably do it really cheaply too - how hard can it be?"

Famous last words!

These next couple are before and after being acid dipped & primered:

From here on, the work stepped up somewhat...