Time to get back to "current events." I'll continue with the back-story later.
The bottom of a car is not a pretty sight. Especially after years of all-season daily use in inclement weather and the occasional oil leak or two. How do you get all that grunge off, and what is hiding underneath it? While it may be possible to get it off while lying on your back beneath the car with a scraper in one hand and a can of solvent in the other, take it from me, that gets old in a hurry.
A total restoration requires that the bottom of a car as well as the stripped interior and all the little nooks and crannies must be cleaned and inspected for hidden damage like rust spots on the steel chassis and electrolytic corrsion where the steel and aluminum come into contact with each other. A common practice to make this easier is to separate the chassis from the body and treat each individually. But the Alfatross's hand-made aluminum body could not be separated from its steel chassis without cutting it. So the only option is to treat the body and chassis at the same time on a rotisserie.
Restorers often use a car rotisserie to take the aggravation out of this important, but often neglected aspect of a restoration. In the case of the Alfatross, we took a page from the playbook of the guys at the car museum in Phoenix who did something similar a few years ago. Instead of attaching the rotisserie to the car's frame, which is the standard practice, they fabricated two brackets inside the body and on top of the frame so they could pass an iron pipe straight through the car from the trunk opening to the grille opening. This resulted in much better balance and control of the car during rotation.
After obtaining excellent engineering drawings of the brackets from Mr. Jean-Marc Freslon we set about making our own brackets for the Alfatross. The brackets are pretty simple, but we needed fairly heavy wall material--have you checked out the price of steel these days? They don't give it away, even scrap!
The bottom of a car is not a pretty sight. Especially after years of all-season daily use in inclement weather and the occasional oil leak or two. How do you get all that grunge off, and what is hiding underneath it? While it may be possible to get it off while lying on your back beneath the car with a scraper in one hand and a can of solvent in the other, take it from me, that gets old in a hurry.
A total restoration requires that the bottom of a car as well as the stripped interior and all the little nooks and crannies must be cleaned and inspected for hidden damage like rust spots on the steel chassis and electrolytic corrsion where the steel and aluminum come into contact with each other. A common practice to make this easier is to separate the chassis from the body and treat each individually. But the Alfatross's hand-made aluminum body could not be separated from its steel chassis without cutting it. So the only option is to treat the body and chassis at the same time on a rotisserie.
Restorers often use a car rotisserie to take the aggravation out of this important, but often neglected aspect of a restoration. In the case of the Alfatross, we took a page from the playbook of the guys at the car museum in Phoenix who did something similar a few years ago. Instead of attaching the rotisserie to the car's frame, which is the standard practice, they fabricated two brackets inside the body and on top of the frame so they could pass an iron pipe straight through the car from the trunk opening to the grille opening. This resulted in much better balance and control of the car during rotation.
After obtaining excellent engineering drawings of the brackets from Mr. Jean-Marc Freslon we set about making our own brackets for the Alfatross. The brackets are pretty simple, but we needed fairly heavy wall material--have you checked out the price of steel these days? They don't give it away, even scrap!
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| Dave measuring the shock tower bolt pattern spacing.
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