Now that's better!

Most of the dusty dirty greasy is now behind me and the reassembly starts.  I still have a lot of fasteners and odds and ends in little baggies and brand new clean stuff coming in from the aftermarket suppliers.  The big news is that the frame and some assorted parts are back from Component Finishing in Santa Clara and they look great. Cost about $600 for this and the A-arms and a bunch of bolt on parts.

I spent some time at Component Finishing after sandblast and before powdercoat with a flashlight and tap hammer inspecting the welds and everything looked pretty solid.  Of course that's not definitive but nothing turned up and I felt confident enough to tell them to go ahead and powdercoat it.

Here's what the frame looks like in the trailer coming home

 

I want to add a comment here about how the body is attached.  There are four mounting points attached to the frame on each side, numbered 1-4 LH/RH.  In the picture you can see #3-LH upper right near the chain as a little square and further down the rail, the #2-LH near the wooden board.

Separately I dropped my differential off at Corvette Repair (it's making clunking noises when I go from reverse to forward) and I got a "really oughta" lecture from the owner about how I really oughta make sure my frame is straight.  Something about a guy up in Petaluma who ...

Well that's not going to happen but I did get to thinking I could do a pretty good survey myself for not too much money.  And I did have an accident or two with the car.  Plus there's been years of the engine trying to twist the frame at full throttle.  On the plus side these cars were supplied with some monster engines and are fairly rugged.

Here's the setup.  The #2 and #3 mounts on both rails form a rectangle.  If everything is OK, that rectangle is flat.  If the frame were "racked" in any way, then the edge from say #2 LH to #2 RH would not be parallel to #3 LH to #3 RH.   And the diagonal from #2 LH to #3 RH would not ever cross the one from #2 RH to #3 LH.

I went down to Fry's, the local electronics store and spent $4 total for two keychain lasers.  With a little plumber's putty I could fasten the laser to the frame and adjust it to beam to the opposite corner something like this

This laser is at the #3 RH mount and is shining on the #2 LH mount.  Another laser is on the #3 LH mount and is shining on the #2 RH mount

With the lasers in place, take a piece of paper and sweep it along the centerline of the frame to see where the photons crash into each other, figuratively speaking.  That looks like this:

These two beams are perfectly coincident and this portion of the platform is perfectly flat.

The next thing to try is to figure out where the #4 mounts are in relation to this rectangle.  The next picture shows a 4' level clamped across the frame and 7' piece of perfectly straight bar stock lying atop the #2 and #3 mounts. 

These dimensions just happen to workout that the level clamped across the frame sits about 1/16" above the bar stock sitting atop the body mounts

The difference in thespace between the level on the LH vs. the RH is about 1/16" inch.  Hardly enough to worry about.  The good news is that the frame looks about perfect.