Yesterday was a slow day in the shop for me, and being in a bit of a mental funk, I decided not to post anything. I tossed and turned all Sunday night re-playing that trackbar mounting plate welding disaster in my head. That told me the difficulty of the weld was still "in my head space," and I'd better wait another day. Instead of welding that trackbar mount on, I decided to apply zinc primer to the frame behind the future mid-arm control arm mounts. Here's the passenger front side (the thin blue line you can see is the location of the front edge of the bracket):
After a good night's sleep last night (well, good by old guy standards, anyway), I started preparing for welding, in earnest, this morning. I wanted to get the frame all cleaned up where the old brackets were removed, and I had an idea to avoid the waviness I got when I did the
rear frame raise project. When I did that project, I used the 36 grit Cubitron disc to great effect removing the weld's left over after cutting the brackets off. That left circular patterns of scratches from the 36 grit abrasive. The 40 grit pads on the random orbital sander wouldn't cut through those very well, so I tried carefully and slowly using the 36 grit Cubitron to clean those up.
After thinking about it more last week, I realized how that was a mistake. First off, I concentrated on removing those localized scratches instead of grinding a larger area to keep it flat. That created the waves. Secondly, using 36 grit to remove 36 grit scratches is just plain ignorant. I needed a finer grit Cubitron to clean up behind the 36 grit discs, so I ordered some 80 grit Cubitrons last week on Amazon. Unfortunately, they didn't even ship until yesterday, and since they are not from Amazon directly, and it's a holiday week, they are coming UPS - next Monday.
Since that doesn't help my progress, yesterday morning, I got on the phone to the local autobody supply shop (Tasco, a big chain) to see if they had some 80 grit Cubitrons in stock. They didn't, but a store down in North Austin had some. My wife was headed that way for some provisions, so she picked them up for me yesterday. This morning, I tested my theory of cleaning up with the 80 grits using wide coverage prior to using the 40 grit discs on the random orbital, and I'm very pleased. I was able to minimize the waviness I got when I did the rear of the frame! Check out this section, which was the worst of all because I screwed up using my flush cut plasma consumables:
I'm pleased! With that done, my mind's in the right place to attempt welding once again, and that's on the agenda for sometime today. I've still got the front of the frame to clean up, but before that, I need to apply zinc primer to the rear arches, where the spring perches will be welded back on. Stay tuned!