A buddy of mine and I are working on our first frame. It's his 52 Henry J that hes building into a street rod version of an old gasser. This might be a lot of information but I'm proud of it. We used c-clamps on all the welds to keep the gaps from wandering.
***If inserting direct links to the images does not work I will attach them in order***
General information about the frame: the front rails extend back onto the middle rails with a 6 inch overlap. The middle rails go back towards his middle crossmember which is the mounting point for his rear kickup rails. There will be an x-member fabricated and installed just before the middle crossmember. The kickup rails extend over the rear axles along with the kickdowns. We have actually taken about 3 schooldays to put this together minus the time laying it out on the floor and taking the measurements we need. The whole rear section is tack welded in place and only needs a full bead around both rails and then the frame is complete. We plan on having the steering setup and suspension installed and then installing the x-member before school is over. What I am really proud of is that the whole frame measuring across from the front to rear was only an 1/8th of an inch off of the original frame and the angles of the kickups and the height all the way around matched the original perfectly.
A few pictures:
Car at ride height. Keep in mind that he is making it into a gasser which is why it is going to sit this way. (He's not using this body. Was only purchased for mach up)
The front section (no kickups installed yet). The roundtubing on the front rails was a scrap piece we made to keep the front rails from moving around when welding in the crossmember.
The 6 inch overlap. This was welded in with tacks 8 tacks around for precautions. The actual welds are 6-8 continous beads around the overlap. We switched sides on the metal after each weld to make sure it would not distort the metal and maintaining level. We ran the beads over the tacks for constant penetration which is why they don't look as pretty as they could.
The crossmember was welded in place the same way.
My friend just getting done laying the first bead on the rear frame rails. Done the same way as the others except with a sleeve behind the connection and 8 plug welds all around the main beads.
My rear frame rail after completion.
My friend laying a bead on his side of the rear crossmember.
The master at work...
Here is where magic happened. We rummaged around in the scrap bin to find metal we could piece together for supports for the rear frame rails. The kickups had to be placed perfectly on the middle crossmember or the rear crossmember could not be bolted to the body. Every angle, length, width and height demensions could be off if it wasn't placed perfectly squared onto the crossmember. We plan on holding the rails up at an estimated height just by looking and onto the crossmember the same way and tack welding the rails onto the crossmember and onto the supports. We planned on braking the tacks later to make needed adjustments. So I am holding the rails up and against the crossmember while he tacks them in place. He gets them tacked and we bring an angle finder over to see what adjustments we are going to need to make. The first angle is fine, and the second, third, fourth and the last angle, which was on the rear crossmember was at 0 which means it was perfectly level. We measured across the length, width, and checked for diamond and every measurement was exact. This was achieved by only looking at it and saying, "Yeah, that looks good enough to tack in place for now." We didn't need to make a single adjustment.
This is something I am personally proud of. A complete diagram of a side view of the frame. A lot of this layout came from a lot of hard thinking by me. Only the rear rails were made based off of the original frame. The rest of it was custom made off of this layout. Every measurement was based off of this layout and was checked with a layout of the original rear frame rails. We found every length, width, and angle to cut because of this layout.
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