Mark's 1G Winter Projects

[Mark Leasure]

Got my tube bender and some 4130 1-5/8” 0.83” wall tubing. I realized that the bender needs to be secured to the floor, as it takes a lot of torque to operate the bender, with a 3 foot extension handle. I researched it a little bit and ended up drilling the floor for some female 5/8” threaded inserts. Cool product, now I can mount the bender or whatever to the floor. It will come in handy in the future. The bender doesn’t like to bend this 0.083" wall thickness chromoly past 70 degrees without having some collapsing problems. I’m sure its operator error somehow. I worked around it, I’ll provide pictures later when I finish it up, hopefully this weekend! It was a whole process designing the front tube and how to bend everything correctly, the first try!

[Mark Leasure]

Oh and on the door panel thing, I think I’m going to run OEM door panels for now. They are decently light and make it look like a sleeper.

[mondale]

If you are going to be bending a decent amount more tubing in the future and want to tinker/fabricate you should really look at mean street's bender. The older guy just finished attaching a hydraulic ram to it with a variable ratcheting base that allows you to bend a tube quite a bit past 90 with a straight push hydraulic cylinder. A fun project for those rare weekends when nothing breaks on these cars

[Mark Leasure]

Just got the front end all wrapped up. Now I just need to tear it all down, finish weld everything, and send it off to get the bumper and engine bay painted.

I'm happy with the way it turned out.