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My recycle bucket

ScottRS said:
In January, I was expecting this to be a two plus year build. Normally, I'm on a plane nearly every week for work, home little more than weekends.
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​​​​​​Along came a virus. And I suddenly have a lot more at-home time than expected. Two weeks of vacation have already been turned into furlough, I've been on a plane twice (two directions, not two trips) since March... Progress on this has been amazingly fast, though I have to admit, not for reasons I'm entirely happy about.
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Yep, same here! I'm getting a lot done. I'm still "working" from home as best we can, even if I do a full 8-10 hours work, I have 3 hours less commute each day. I'm trying to do SOMETHING on my projects every day, even if it's just sitting there for a few minutes pondering my options or planning out my next move, or nonsense like cleaning up, or whatever.

Anyway, love the build :smokin:
 
Minor trim on the grille got it out, so I can paint it and put it back (I just love the taking it all apart after all this work stage of tube cars). Yes, this is hack work on the grille. But I had to get it out somehow, couldn't paint it where it was.

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With it out, a little cleanup of my prior hackery, and y'know, it'd sure be nice to just sandblast it instead of hand sanding. No, a cj grille will not (quite) fit in a horrible fright upright blast cabinet. Guess I'll be hand sanding a while after all.

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An update pic of where it sits structurally now, with the body bits mostly stripped. Still need to get on a fuel system, I think I know what I'm doing there but it's going to be very time consuming building tanks.

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Time for more cardboard aided design, this time it's fuel tank. This tank will be in the belly next to the transfer case, should hold about 11.5 gallons. This is planned to be the downstream tank in the system.

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My brake-having neighbor had a little time, so we bent my belly tank shell and my rear tank shell pieces. Going to be TIGing for a little while now.

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That shouldn't be bad to weld watertight. (Fuel tight) I like 6061-T0 for fuel tanks. Still easy to weld, but a bit stronger and more corrosion protection. I made mine out of stainless. Thought it would be easy to weld. I was wrong. PITA. But I suck at welding anymore.
 
It's the same grade of material I made my buggy tank out of years ago, that was used and aged scrap/drop/whatever (recycle bucket theme here) and welded like crap. This stuff is welding quite a bit better, not as nice as 6061, but it works. I'll pressure test the tanks before they see anything flammable. And I have to water test them too, as I have some odd little trickery that I'm going to try on this thing to keep from splashing gas out of my cargo area false floor at off-level angles. I'll post up the details of that when/if it's confirmed to work.
 
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I mentioned some trickery coming. Here's the first of it: check out my shiny metal balls! The bag of lots of them are stainless, the bag of only a few, are hollow aluminum. They're all 1/2" diameter for anyone wondering.

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Completed, it looks like this. This is a cheap bastard discriminator valve. Fitting to the top, aluminum ball under it, stainless ball under that, spring under that, another fitting, and put it all together.

Why? Well, mount it right side up in your fuel tank vent, and it allows the tank to breathe... until/unless you slosh fuel up the tube to it, which floats the aluminum ball, and stops the fuel going out. Flip it upside down, and the stainless ball pushes the aluminum ball down, closing the vent, and stopping fuel getting out. Back right side up, and it's free breathing again.

This is imperfect. It leaks a little. I think it will be better with a rubber ball on top of the aluminum ball, because I think rubber will seal better than the aluminum ball, but it won't float well enough in gas to do the job alone, I'll need the flotation of the aluminum ball.

But that said, it only leaks a slow dribble. I think for a trail rig, this would be a big help. For a comp rig, probably still want the three sides and down and/or a catch can.

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Thats pretty awesome. :smokin:

Could you epoxy or ? an o-ring to the bottom of the fitting on the "out" side of the valve to seal the ball better? That should solve the dribbling problem.
 
SLOWPOKE693 said:
Thats pretty awesome. :smokin:

Could you epoxy or ? an o-ring to the bottom of the fitting on the "out" side of the valve to seal the ball better? That should solve the dribbling problem.
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Thanks! This goes to my big flat tank situation, I'm making a dual fuel tank for this rig, but treating them as (sort of) one, the rear (cargo area false floor) will end up about 48x23x3, huge and flat. Huge and flat is horrendously bad for slosh/venting/filling, so I needed something that would allow it to breathe off angle and not just start pumping gas out every time I drive up a curb. This should accomplish just that, I'll put at least two of these on that tank, at opposite corners, maybe four (one at each top corner) so there's always a path for air to breathe at the high point. "Path of least resistance" should help motivate it to breathe through only the free (high, in air) corner. I hope. Testing yet to be done.

The big flat cargo floor tank will feed to my belly tank, which is much closer to normal (9x10x34ish) and will be treated as a normal tank for pump pickup purposes, it just won't have a traditional fill as it will live completely under the floor and be fed from and vented to, the cargo floor tank.

On the O-ring idea: Probably. If I was a really slick machinist, I could probably cut an O-ring groove in the inside of the body of the valve just below the upper fitting, which would probably be even better yet. Even without a groove, chances are, just shoving a 9/16 ODx7/16 ID O-ring down there, then once the upper fitting is in place, shoving the O-ring back up against the top fitting, would probably be "good enough". I might have some of those O-rings, don't have any rubber balls. Within the height of the existing aluminum tube, an O-ring will fit, a rubber ball, I would have to recut the spring or make a longer valve body.

I'm also not sure if the dribble is because the aluminum ball is imperfectly spherical (probably), because the inside of the fitting isn't perfectly smooth, or some combination thereof. I'll probably try lathe turning the inside of the fitting and see how/if that helps with the dribble just for grins (got the tools, may as well try it). Along those lines, merely building this with aluminum "racecar" fittings instead of cheapo steel "industrial hydraulic" fittings might be all it takes.
 
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Belly tank welded up, leak checking it. 11psi air (oops, I would normally pressure test tanks closer to 2-3) and after welding up a half dozen or so pinholes, it seems to be airtight.

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I'm also getting into paint at this point, I did the headers, nothing exotic, just 2000F exhaust primer and paint. But it says to paint, then bake at 250/30min, cool, bake at 400/30min, cool, bake at 600/30min, cool... and my oven doesn't go to 600. So I did 550 in the oven and 650ish on the grill. Nomnomnom.

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On the paint front, I did the hood. Poorly. It got green, but the results were bad even by my standards, and I'm a "just rub it on a rock" kind of body guy.

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I ended up with this weird pebble texture that brushed away to leave something that looked like orange peel behind. So... time for a do-over.

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I took the whole hood down to last-good-layer which was primer (and went through that to gelcoat a fair bit too) so I'll be priming it again and going from there.

No paint sticks like whatever you want to remove. I spent more time removing gummy green than I did removing bedliner the first go-around on this thing.
 
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That paint actually looks kind of cool if it was consistent.
 
Little bit of twist and stuff and steer (sort of, just disconnected the steering since it was easier) to check where I can land the rear outboard seatbelt mount, and things are as tight as I expected. Rear tire rub will be a thing in this car from time to time. There will be paneling in between the rear seat and the tire at some point when I figure out how to make it. I'll probably sneak the rear axle rearwards about a half inch to help the clearance, the links are adjusted about as short as they get right now.

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Multipurpose tube here. The tire will rub on this at full twist/lock, but it's in a nearly perfectly circumferential direction, so it should only take paint off, not grab. Other side of the tube hits the seat cushion, and will give me a point to mount the outboard rear seatbelt anchor. And I'll build the rear wheel tubs off of this tube to help keep mud off little people and little fingers out of the coilovers and tires.
The tire hits the rub tube, the nerf bar, and the lower link, all almost simultaneously, so I'm feeling pretty good about placement there.

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This one isn't especially hardcore, might be closer to albacore. But I enslaved a couple children and got some wheeltubs paneled in.

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So some of this project is silly for silly's sake. This is one of those, sort of. I need a tailgate. I want a "Jeep" stamped tailgate, because it's a Jeep, right? And I want it to drop down like a pickup to be a workbench for making breakfast on in camp and stuff like that. Not swing sideways like a postal or TJ tailgate. So that leaves me with buy an old CJ one, buy a repro CJ one, or make one out of the postal tailgate. So here we go, section the window out of the postal tailgate.

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Onward to doing things I'm utterly unqualified for, like old-school bodywork. Of all the absurd things to do with this, once I get the tailgate sorted, I'll cut the back end of my Jeep to fit it. Seems a little backwards, but so are a lot of things in this project.

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