I've been really busy, honest.
By the time you've finished reading tonight's installment(s), we should be at the point where the dash is ready for primer.
But first:
Those six defrost vents near the leading edge of the dash were going to be a complete pig to shape and sand in a way that didn't look awful. I therefore set forth to find some trim items to help eliminate the need for fine/consistent sculpting, but could find nothing commercially. I could mentally picture what I wanted, so decided to make it.
Rather than writing this as a suspense-builder, here's the (nearly) finished result:
And here's how I made them; starting with what turned out to be a prototype, then refining it some and enrolling the help of my son's friend, Kyle, with the metal joinery.
The top flange, for lack of a better description...
... and the wall/tube.
I then turned my big Miller way down low and obtained this result. It fit well, but visually wan't good enough, and required too much grinding post-welding.
The next morning I came to the conclusion that my idea was OK, but that I needed to both cut out the component parts with more accuracy, and find something other than the MIG to tack them together. While my metal cutting tools are relatively limited, I didn't want to be
that guy ("a bad workman blames his tools"), and challenged myself to use sufficient care and control to cut a more consistent set of components.
I drilled the pilot holes on my Dunlap (Sears) drill press (left to me by my wife's late grandpa), then punched the larger holes with some Greenlee "stud driven hole punches" I bought a couple of years ago from a older machinist who was retiring to Florida (last fall I bought a set of Fairlawn body hammers from another older machinist retiring to the South, but he was headed to South Carolina; New England loses many senior citizens who head to the warmth and lower taxes of Dixie)
I cut the straight lines with a die grinder; on my prototype I'd used a jig saw but that was really a bit too brutal on the thin sheet metal, even with a fine-tooth blade.
As mentioned earlier, my son and his best bud went in on an inexpensive TiG welder a few years back, and they tacked my parts together with the tiniest of welds.
After this, I cleaned up the top faces with sweet little 2" Norton flap disks on the air grinder, then smeared some JB Weld around the minor gaps and shot the vents with some spray bomb self-etch primer.
Next: Rage on, Rage off, rinse and repeat.
John