"Uncle Ben" - Rambler American Wagon / Lexus SC300 Body Swap

FYI the hidden hitch is stiil yours....meet you half way......Merry Christmas 

This morning I got the windsheild out and the doors off

Then I started stripping paint off the areas I need to weld to and it started raining. 

Of course, I was supposed to be at work today, but rescheduled for a theoretically drier day that I was planning to spend doing this stuff.

In reply to 759NRNG :

I will be back in that are mid-January, we should just plan to make that happen! 

Got quite a bit done today but only took a few pictures.

All the Americans of this era shared the same chassis and floor pan. To get a floor for the cargo areas in the wagon they just added panels to make a floor. 

These panels have speed holes!

Definitive proof that wagons are the ideal sports cars!

They were a bitch to get out, what with all the nasty boogered on mig welds errywere. 

I tried to use a carbide burr to grind out most of the welds but then I realized I didn't necessarily have do a nice pretty job and broke out my air hammer. 

I can always straighten it later. 

Crackers said:

In reply to 759NRNG :

I will be back in that are mid-January, we should just plan to make that happen! 

I'll be here all year Lord willin'.......Merry Christmas!!!!

I found this thing in the process.

I think old documents like this are cool. 

So after sticking it in a file I needed to work on getting the body level so I could start adding bracing. 

Working on probably the world's worst work surface, I needed an easy way to level it. So I bought these.

Now, these are not really stable enough to support the car by themselves and were only used in conjunction with my wood stands. 

However, they made it pretty easy to make the noise. 

(don't judge me)

More tomorrow...

Listen Bad Obsession has a noise maker too......you are now in rarified company young man....Project UncaBensky?????   Please no tea......the occasional Texas craft beer will suffice

Green Tea. 

I'm from California. 

I want some Bad Obsession merch almost as bad as another episode. 

I made a mistake. 

Fortunately I caught it while being uncharacteristically thorough before it was too late to fix it.

I made the mistake of assuming the frame rails on this were square and level with the body. 

They are not. (Thank you AMC build quality!) 

So I get to cut some of my bracing out and relevel the body off of some other reference points. 

It occurs to me that nothing on this car is likely to be very precise so I think I'm going to use an exterior reference like the drip rails. 

In any case I have to do a lot of staring at it while sipping some sort of beverage in my near future. 

Holy twisted metal Batman!

Apparently, the rear chassis rails and the rear valence are off by 2.3°. The front chassis rails at the firewall are square to the lower windshield frame, but off by +/-1.4° at the lift points I had used to level it previously. 

Oh, and they're off in different directions. So when I used those references to level it, this floppy noodle chassis twisted almost 4°. Enough to visually see the difference when sighting through the cabin.

On a positive note though, with my bracing in place I could jack up the low side high enough to make the body teeter on the diagonally opposing stand and the body was still twisted the opposite direction. Even though it was in a bad position when I braced it, it did stay where I told it to. 

So I got that going for me. Which is nice. 

When I was palying the game at this stage, I realized that I had to choose chassis or body as the fixed point. So, the reality is that I did not spend much if any time bracing the body shell.  I did spend a lot of time making sure the new chassis was level and  centered on my reference table.

When mating the two, I worked under the premise that the pinch welds tend to be a reference point on most collision alignment racks. So with the chassis nailed down on the reference surface, I brought the body pinch welds down to where I wanted them to be.  I then went around and measured from any reference points I trusted on the Volvo to the reference surface and made sure I was on plane.

Finally, I went around and measure that the wheel openings all around were the right distance from the reference surface. Note that there is not assurance that the wheel openings are going to be a reliable measuring point side-to-side.  Depends on the vintage of the car and any work done on it.

Its an amc. Nothing is square, nothing is level, and nothing is dimensionally the same side to side.

We j7st had to embrace our inner track home carpenters for the challenge car.

In reply to NOHOME :

It looks like the job from here in will progress under the assumption that everything was bent. 

If you remember, I had pulled the driver's side fender to work on the gaps in the fender/valence joint. Well, it turns out the passenger fender was replaced/repaired more than once, and the valence itself is tweaked too. 

I'm pretty much positive the passenger side front frame horn is bent up half an inch from a previous accident. So in the end I figured I'd deal with the front sheet metal after the chassis is done so I'm not chasing my tail. I really only want to straighten the front end once. 

The plan for now is to jack the body up with this big ass piece of C-channel I have welded into the door sill. 

(This big ass piece of C-channel that's now welded in the wrong place.) 

I'm making a socket for adjustable legs on the end of that C-channel that will support the body and allow for minor vertical adjustments. It's wide enough for the chassis to roll under it without interference. 

I'm afraid the doors will never line up again if I don't brace the body well enough as they don't have a lot of adjustment and didn't line up all that well to begin with. 

In reply to Dusterbd13 :

So I'm learning...

It was that bad from the factory or because of an accident? That sounds like quite the large “build quality” issue!

The front rails under the A-pillars *might* be accident damage, but the rear hasn't been hit by anything bigger than a shopping cart. 

AMC/Rambler was notorious for shoddy build quality. A lot of parts on these cars were "bend/trim to fit" on the factory assembly line. 

Lots of stuff on this car even varies in quality from left side to right side. Things like the number, placement and quality of spot welds or even mig welds vary wildly from side to side. 

For instance, the front core support had twice as many spot welds on the passenger side, but about a third of them had failed. (Oddly, the whole right side of this car is literally falling apart comparatively speaking.)

I would totally believe the idea that this thing has bent under it's own weight though.

These cars were so noodly that they failed federal safety requirements for 1969. So late 68 cars had an additional section of frame rail added to the chassis. 

Uncle Ben was an early 68 car... 

Here's a picture that shows the additional frame rails on the underside of a 69 SC/Rambler undergoing a concourse restoration. 

The original frame terminated just behind the shifter hole at the cross member. The added frame rail was effectively a subframe connector that got slapped on top with ample space around the original support structure to collect rain, salt, dirt, etc.

Aside from the added support and the shifter hole, this is identical to the underside of the wagons. 

There are lots of gaps that shouldn't be there. Of note, are the parking brake bracket, (booger welded and hanging out in space) and the gap between the rocker and the lift box flange. (And this guy had already fixed a lot of stuff.)

That’s pretty nuts, here I thought cars in the 60’s lacked stiffness and were all kinda noodly, I didn’t know some of them were that bad! I’ve heard some pretty sketchy things from people working at the local former GM plant about sketchy practices, I guess bend and trim to fit works.

I got it straightened and leveled again, and finally started in on the carnage NOHOME has been waiting for. 

I still need get some all-thread to make the actual jacking mechanism for the legs so it's sitting crooked right now. (Until then my adjustment is in 6" increments.)

It's getting awfully cluttered, and I'm pushing my neighbors tolerance. So this weekend is going to involve hauling off my scrap. 

I'm running out of berkeleys and the number of panels and such I'm trying to salvage for resale is shrinking quick. 

In reply to Rufledt :

Speaking of build quality...

Those gaps aren't supposed to be there. The fitment between these two panels is so bad I don't think ANY of the spot welds are actually doing anything. (It will come off with an enthusiastic yank with some vise grips.)

I'll have to try to get some better pictures that really show how bad that panel fit is. I was too cold to screw around any more today. 

Yup. Looks about right for amc. Which was only marginally worse than mopar of the era. 

Yup....loving this!

In reply to NOHOME :

Heathen.

At present, the bulk of the floor has been chiseled out with the air hammer. There's still a lot of the fiddly bits to remove, but that will require a more tactful approach than most of what was employed today. Although, sometimes a day of brute force and ignorance can be quite cathartic. I even kept all my blood!!!

I'm not taking any pictures until I can clean up a bit. My driveway looks like a bomb went off, what with all the piles of mangled sheet metal and whatnot. 

First, I need to get that damn motor off the flatbed, but at least I have a plan. 

Crackers said:

In reply to NOHOME :

I even kept all my blood!!!

 

Bonus points if you kept all of your blood inside your body.  Keeping it in jars next to the project car doesn't count.

Tryin' your neighbors patience!?!?!?!!! You should see  the dude two doors down from me with the mudbog/monster truck fabrication yard spillin' out all over everywhere!!! I kinda like it myself(the raised3+3dually4x4especially), but alas i'm sure the real estate agent across the street ain't too thrilled...BWaHahahaaaaa!!!! Shoot push come to shove, with your made framework skills you could have your very own Cristo blue tarp thingy goin' ON!!!