Sum_Fing_Wong's Project Levin

[RT]

Great work, lovin' it!!

[Sum_fing_wong]

Thanks RT, progress has been slow lately been kinda lazy. I was bored this weekend and i had the parts ready so i decided to do this ! any way here's a quick update. my apologies about the pic, the camera on my phone is starting to crap out on me.


test fitted !

Had to undo some of the hard work from earlier in the build, cutting and grinding from under the car really sucks, cutting a grinding through spot welds and seam welds sucks even more since all the metal is weld hardened, how I wish I still had my rotisserie handy, but I had to lend it to a friend.

since I was planning to do this to the car as a future evolution of the car, I started to think ... and figured what better time then now to equal link the rear end.


still need to measure and cut out the other side.

[Sum_fing_wong]

Hey gang, finally found some time to do a bit more work on the car, cleaned up the cuts lots of measuring and premeasuring, once I was happy with the measurements. I tied in the frame rails to the rest of the floor. Basically when cutting out the floor for the equal link boxes it takes some of the frame rail flange with it so for a portion of the cut the floor and the frame rail is no longer connected, so some welding is needed, hopefully the pictures will closely reflect what I've said here.





once I've tied the frame rails back into the floor I went ahead and started drilling out the flanges on the equal link boxes so that I can plug weld in the boxes, instead of welding in either side of the flanges. With tired arms and shoulders as well as two burnt out bits here's what it looks like with 100+ holes in the flanges looks like. The reason why I decided against welding in either side of the mounting flange is ... it would be hard to get the welder in at the correct angle to ensure a nice weld also the plug welds will look neater, although there will be some areas where in combination with the plug welds I will weld on inside and outside of the mounting flange ... hum hopefully it makes sense in what I'm trying to explain. if not I'll try to re-iterate with pictures once I get the boxes welded in, I'm currently waiting on some supplies before I weld in the boxes.






I also made a patch (see picture below) as once the passenger side equal link box is welded in there will be a hole where debris and water and what have you could be able to make its way in the car. with trial fitting I've determined that once the box is welded in it would be near impossible to go back to weld up that hole, can't have that happening, so I plugged that sucker up while I still could.



Stay tuned more updates to come !

[Ivan141]

Great work. Looks neat.
If it was me doing the equal length thing, I would be boxing those new brackets in.
Like so (pic is of an escort):

[Sum_fing_wong]

(06-03-2015 10:47 PM)Ivan141 Wrote:  Great work. Looks neat.
If it was me doing the equal length thing, I would be boxing those new brackets in.
Like so (pic is of an escort):

Thanks for the kind words and advice Ivan, I had contemplated boxing them in but I can't justify the additional weight, the trd boxes although not as tall didn't need any more additional support (trd bible). I figure these should be okay, plus I have another maybe more elegant method of additional rigidity and reinforcement for the boxes floating around in my head ... hehe it involves a cnc machine just have to cadd up what I have in mind !

[Ivan141]

Granted, the escort needs more added rigidity than an AE86, but this is so much prettier to look at than a bar welded across the tops of the boxes like you sometimes see. For me, most of these modifications are as much eye candy as they are functional improvements.

[Sum_fing_wong]

Welp it's been quite some time since my last update, there has been some major progress with the Levin! Thanks to my friend lending me his rotisserie, I was able to finish some additional bracing, as well as figuring out my trunk latch and lastly I was able to do a final look over! I've also started an instagram account which I update a little more regularly Willy_wonka_008.

First thing I did was to Re do a patch I did way back when I first got the car, now that I've gotten more experianced with metal work I was able to Re make it much much better!





Next on the list of to do's after the rear patch (see above)was to finally weld in the equal link boxes. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of that process. Once that was completed I was able make and weld the final brace.



And finally I was able to sort out how to latch the trunk using the original latch, since I've either misplaced or thrown out the org brace that had the striker mounted to it when I cut it out when I decided to run the fuel fill in the rear panel.



Continuing on... Since I was on a roll, with some renewed interest in the project I decided that I would manually strip every panel, to make sure that I didn't miss any rusty areas, since once I've blasted i wouldn't have the window to bring it back home to repair. I also decided to test fit some new frp and carbon panels.

[Ivan141]

Awesome work.. great to see you back at it again.