No turning back

Well, I’ve finally summoned the courage to start cutting bits off the chassis. I started small by removing one of the old-style seat belt brackets. Easy, let’s do something bigger. Ten minutes later the rear top radius rod mounting was history.

Near-side upper radius arm support is removed.

There’s definitely an art to using an angle grinder. Get it wrong and the damage it can do is frightening! I’m using a thin cut-off discs to slice through the unwanted parts. I follow that with a coarse 40 grit flap-wheel to get rid of the weld bead. It’s quite surprising how fast the flap-wheel ripped through the metal!  The flap wheel is so much better than the traditional solid grinding disc. I then finish with a medium flap-wheel to get a good finish. So far I’ve only made one error where the flap wheel touched the chassis in the wrong place. Otherwise this has been done without removing any tube wall thickness.

First attempt to grind away a weld

I seems impossible to remove all traces of the weld due to minor distortions to the tube wall, but I think it will be fine once the Zinga zinc and ceramic coating have been applied.

That’s all for now, back to the daily grind…

Ian

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