Father & Son Build - Assembling the Painted Chassis

Video Transcript

Nathan, you get the fun job of wire wheeling. Yeah, with the new Ryobi. New? That’s older than you are. That’s what I said.new. New to the garage at least.

If you want to start assembling everything, which it looks like you do based on the fact that you already started assembling stuff without waiting for me, then you’ve got to pull them all apart so we can grease them properly. So now you get to clean all the hardware, which.guess what.you would have had to do anyway. Your hardware, you clean it. Yeah, so you get to do that. I'll be back later. Mhm.

Hi guys, I'm Sam. And I'm Nate. Welcome to our garage, where today, as you can see, Nathan's already started doing some of the assembly. He's got the roll cage painted, for the most part. There are some spots he needs to touch up, and some things are going to have to come off, like the air conditioning condenser, but and the cage, of course. We've got some of the parts and pieces laid out here, and we're just going to start going through and doing some of the assembly prep.

I think first things first, we're going to start with getting the spring plates installed. I've already got them indexed on both sides at 22°. Hopefully, that should be the right ride height.or at least close enough. And hopefully, I've got both sides level. I checked with my protractor, and everything looked good, so we're going to start there.

Oh wow, is this the PN 91119? No, it’s the part number 16-51076. Well, this is.I don't know where that part number is from. Probably the company that actually produces it for EMPI, the one EMPI buys it from. Our torsion bars are greased. Our spring plate bushings are not. Everyone says urethane bushings are super squeaky. Well, they are if you don't grease them, which is why we have this stuff. So this is why we grease it.

You've got gloves. Tear off the end of that, and you don't have to coat the living heck out of it. This stuff is extremely sticky, so just like that.nice thin coat. Smear that out, see how she does all the way around. Coat it too much? All again, you have to coat all the way around it, Nathan. Not just those areas. So just take it, smear it out, spread it out so it doesn’t go. Yeah, smear some on that face. That's going to go inside, and it's going to be twisting against the torsion housing on the inside.

There we go. Well, I was just wondering how. Oh wow, that went really easy. Yeah, it's much easier when you have grease. Oh, oh.we didn't actually put any on the inside, though, right? Well, pull it out and put some on the inside here. Inside is the most important because that’s the spot where it actually twists.

All right, that goes on. Spring plate goes on the non-sticky part. Well, you're going to slide a sticky bushing over it in a second. So we're looking for 22°, and that's when we're going to push it in? Or.yeah, somewhere in that ballpark.

Try and push it in up on the teeth? Yes, we are. All right. All right, maybe grab the, uh, orange hammer. Hold up, we’re not actually getting in. Let's try this a different way then. See, this is how I got it on last time. It's a bit easier.

That doesn’t look like 22° to me. Yeah, no. All right. Would that be it? It should be. Those teeth only go in certain spots, so. All right, do that. All right.

You know what? That's not going to be enough angle, I don’t think. Although we did notch the spring plates from last time. Last time we were on here, we notched them, so it should be good. Let’s.let’s run with that. All right, will it go any further? It should. Yep. All right, that should be enough.

So where is the greasy greases? Oh, you, uh. That’s, uh, it’s over in the Mediterranean Sea. I know. How do you let.You just go. Since this is also going to be slightly moving.Y'all surfaces.coat it all.

And because these spring plates are notched and our torsion housing is also cut down, these went on much easier than normal. Because a lot of times, what you'd have to do is preload this by jacking up the vehicle off this.sometimes actually strapping the chassis to the jack or using a spring plate tool to compress this up. Basically, it’s a large clamp.

I should push the car. Or maybe I should hold up while you push the car.

There we go. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Yeah. Does it want to just. Like it's brand new. Yeah, just like we painted it last week. Yeah, we only painted it like five days ago. I mean.Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.oh, oh yeah. I forgot we painted it Sunday. I thought we painted it on. Yeah, that’s why, when you homeschool, you don’t know how to keep track of your days. Like us working-class folk. I still school. Yeah, but you don’t keep track of days, and you don’t get up on normal. Wipe. Put some more grease on there, just for good measure. Well actually, um, this week I’ve been getting up at like 8:30. Like the rest of the world.

All right, now you can line up your screws. Start.grab another one. Grab the opposite corners if you can, just for some fancy accents. Allen-headed bolts, black washers.oh, she just looks so good with the dark green, the light green, and then the.That’s why I did that. And the slight piece of red. Yeah.

That one good? That one good. That one’s good. That one’s good.

Are we going to get this arm on, or do that side? And then. Let’s do that side. And then we’re going to come back and start with the trailing arms. Yeah, I guess.

Get the bushings all greased so they don’t go squeaker squeaker squeaker squeaker.

Did you grease the inside too? Yeah, all around. All the sides.

All right, now we gotta get all that hardware. I guess we might as well grease these too.

The outside? Just with the extra hand grease. Yep. So grease.I can just push it all in with my hand? Just with my hands? Perfect. I mean, it was hard, but I got it. Nice.

All right, now the fun part is we’ve got to get this bolt in and get these guys bolted up. Well, not scratching our first. Good luck on that. There’s all that.

Washers go on the outside of the pivot bolt over there. Oh, the pivot. Get that lined up. Yeah, you got both bolts in? Or both washers in? Slide the bolts in.

I like the way that clean looks. Brand new. Almost.

All right, get that guy in there too. So the washers go like that and then in there? I normally go with the bulge from the inside to the outside. You gotta put a washer on. Please. All right. Oh, well. Uh, do we have the upper shock bolt?

My car is going together. It looks so good with all the green hardware.

All right, down. Now, if we were to re-jack this thing up, it would go. Yeah, it's on the spring plate. We may have to put some more load in those spring plates, but we'll find out later. Well, you know what? There's a jack right there. Let's find out.

Before we bolt that side up, it brings the car up, so it's good. Yeah, the car’s good. Yeah, but how stiff is it? That's good. And we might need to stiffen it up some, but we'll find out when we. Right now, the car. When we put the engine and everything else and the body on, it might get soft and squatty, but we'll find out. Yeah, we’ll find out. All right, we're going to do the same thing over there.

All right, back from dinner.

I guess we could get the shifter. No, we don't want to put the shifter in until the transmission’s in. But we could put the pedal assembly in. No. That’d be fun. We can do the master cylinder. Oh, yeah.

So what needs to go over this guy? What needs to go over that guy is what needs to go in that guy. And what needs to go in that guy is grommets.

In the meantime, in between time, while I'm looking for grommets. Spacers on the table. You gotta find bolts that are long enough to go through here into the master cylinder with the spacers on and with washers.

Found ‘em.

Make sure to install the spacer. Through there before that. It’s still kind of wet because it's. Hold on, we need to put on the boot. Hold on.

Do you not understand what the words "hold" and "on" mean? They mean "no." All right, stop, collaborate, and listen. You know what? We’re going to put a little dab of grease in there.

Wait, this guy goes into there, right? Once it's attached to the master cylinder, yeah. Or the pedal assembly, rather. Dab of grease and just stick that on there. Why? So that that doesn’t lock into there.

Like the dune buggy one we had to cut out when we first got it? Uh, maybe. Perhaps. I can’t remember.

All right, well, I kind of. All right, so. Yeah. Yeah. There we go. This line. And actually, before we do that, might as well. Perfect. All done. It's done. Perfect.

Well, we need to loop around the pedal assembly here. Up through there and into there. Which is why we have these, um, rubbery bushings here already. Oh, you already did? Yeah. Okay.

Where's that super tiny wrench? Right here. So you need to go a 90.or like a 90 into another, like, 45? I was thinking 90-90. Right. I would go 90 that way, but drop that 90 down like that. And then do a 45-ish like that. Got it. Good enough.

All right, now we have to drop down. So does one need to go on both sides? Yep, one needs to go on both sides. Don't even try because we're going to be moving this thing around.

Right, now let’s do a real quick grab of the clutch pedal fork up there.

Now that we got our pedal assembly mocked up, we can see what all we need to clear. So we need to drop down just along this edge, and then we got to come around here. First of all, bending it down, of course. Yeah, so. So, let.pull that out for the moment. So just. Bend. Take a look. Yeah. And we need to bend a little bit more this way, right here, ‘cause that’s going to be. Right about there. So, right about here? Yeah, it should be good.

I can get this dialed back in there. Yeah, just kind of stick that in here. That that way. I like that one. That way, right there. Yeah, it looks so good.

I'm going to start with that tab. So hand me a screwdriver. Or even better. The actual drive tool. Yeah, perfecto.

Can you hold the line while I get this. Thank you. Teamwork. Teamwork. Multitasking. Holding and tightening at the same.

I want to get this before we get too much. Yep. Good call.

You know what's really, really fun, Nathan? What? Installing this brake line in the dark in a fully operating car, from underneath. You did that? That was the first time I ever replaced one of these brake lines. Was she moving? No. No, no, no. Not moving. But it was nighttime, and it was raining. So the car was wet on the bottom side. And it was dark. I was in the garage, in Grandpa Mebane’s house.my house that I grew up in. We had one garage light over the top, like that. That’s all the light I had underneath the car. You know how much light that is? None. And everything was already in. And everything in the car was already in. It was a complete, driving car. Wait, this bolt. This line? I had to replace that entire line. So you had to pull the carpet up? Yeah, that. Not fun.

You get that tight? Got that one tight. I got that line tight. Oh yeah, also, we might want to tighten down these too. You might want to tighten those down. We got our brake lines hooked up back to there. We still gotta paint our rear calipers. Gotta paint our front calipers. Eventually, front beam. But.

Hang out and watch on that camera. What are you doing? Getting a slight bit of an extension so I can get all of them.

We only scratched off a little bit of paint, right? Yeah.

Can we put the pedal assembly in? Oh, Nathan. We gotta put these fronts in. Push an end in, and put it in as much as you can by hand. By hand.

All three lines are tight? Yep. Should be. All the way forward? Or further in the back? I don’t know. You wanna go that way? Sure, why not. All right.

Brake fluid? Good to go. All right. Ayyy, we forgot brake fluid. Oh man. We can’t stop. All right.

Pedal assembly instructions are right there. Don’t tell me you can’t do it.

How are you supposed to do this Dad? Come on. Read the directions. Where’s Figure One? If that’s Figure Two, where’s one? Did we throw a piece of paper away? Well, it doesn’t have Figure one either. Anyway.

Let's see. Does it fit? Better than most things nowadays? Not bad.

Light coat of grease on our accelerator cable. Not too much, not too big. Was I supposed to put that washer in between there so it doesn't shake? What do the instructions say? There are no instructions. You can't even see anything on it.

I'm guessing the roller goes over that? That's a good guess. Look at that. It's kind of the opposite side, but yeah. Is it supposed to sit down like that? Yeah, that's not the way a throttle works. Which way does the throttle work? Oh, that way. I'm going back. How stupid can I be "vroooom"?

Turns out, apparently, we need to get a very small nut and bolt to attach that to that. I think we need a master cylinder push rod now, though. Oh yeah, I did one of those. That bolt goes in there. And that bolt goes in there.

Wow, look how clean my car's coming together.

All right, get that bolted down. Get the front one too. So all the cables, in theory, should work. Oh yeah, that's why that thing’s open. Another quarter inch off or so. Let's see how that goes.

Now, will it still actually go into the transmission? Well, that's going to be a question for the day when we get the transmission in. Should be no slack. A lot of times, if you give yourself way more slack than you need, you can just pull it all the way forward.

You got it? And got one, two. Easy peasy.

That’s there. All right, let's clean up some of this mess. I want to do it. I know, just hang. Hey, put tools away. I did. Oh no, you didn’t. Right here. There. Hardware goes there.

Volkswagen people's car. That’s basically what you're saying? They can hear me, so technically, this is no vw. It’s a people’s car. Perfect.

There you go. Now you know the secret. It looks so nice, huh? Looks like a new car, almost.

We could have gone closer to the pedal, but I'm okay with it. It doesn't matter. Well, actually, not really. Yeah, you're right. We're pretty much as far as we need to be.

Not bad for a couple of hours' work on a Friday night, Nathan. Yeah. Hope we can get the rear pretty much buttoned together tomorrow and hopefully the transmission painted, so then that can go in.

First things first, we’ll clean up the transmission and get it painted. While it's drying, we’ll get all the axles, bearings, and stuff in the back cleaned up, get all that stuff reassembled. We gotta pull apart the rear brake calipers. Those have to be painted. Yeah. Master cylinder in, all the brake lines plumbed up to the trailing arms, all the pedals in.

This is Jeremy Clarkson. We’ll see you next week. I’m just kidding. I’m not Jeremy Clarkson. I can’t drive half as good as he can, and I’m nowhere near as wealthy or as tall, or as big around, or as old. Uh, but on that note, we’ll see you guys hopefully tomorrow.

All right, we're back at it again. Today is Saturday, the 8th of February. It's kind of just a cleanup and paint day. Nathan's working on pulling apart our brake calipers to get those painted red because brakes are red—red stop, stop signs are red—we're going to paint red. Red lights, red lights. Uh, we already painted the master cylinder red; you guys saw that. We've cleaned up, and we've cleaned the transmission. I'll show you guys that in a second. Nathan's got a third coat of paint on the roll cage and a second coat of paint on the rear bumper.

We did a quick rebuild on our transmission, so that's all good to go. Over here, Nathan's got a roll cage all painted up, and we've got the rear bumper. We're getting all of our bearings cleaned up since we did all that fabrication, with all the metal dust and everything else. We're going to get all those cleaned, regreased, and get our rear trailing arms all bolted back together. As far as our axles, bearings, spacers, and whatnots, hopefully, we'll be able to get the rear end back on its own wheels. Nathan's masking away on those calipers.

So that's the work for Saturday. If we get to actually doing any assembly, I'll bring you guys back for that. In the meantime, we're just going to do a whole bunch of cleaning, prepping, and painting, which is my favorite part. Whose favorite part? Mine, because you can actually see progress.

Uh, what would be a plan of attack for getting this thing back there? I normally grab it right here, those pliers, and just push it back, or you can just push it like that. Yeah, I got up to here. Well done we got access up there. We want that thing centered in this general area. Then we got thread on our shift coupler at the back or shift rock connection, which is the aftermarket one, right? Yeah, there, a gauge based on where that was, and keep on going. Right there. So it goes sideways that way, and then just see where it's at. That needs to go on the transmission. We had to make sure that our transmission is in neutral.

How does that look as far as length? How was that inner cup? Too far forward? Yeah, too far forward. Shorten up. Check right there. See, that's good. So now we need to be able to tighten that guy and hold that guy straight. See, now it's definitely too far back there. I'm not entirely sure where I could have just used a nut bolt, you know? They have to use random pointy wires.

I have my safety wire. Safety, some safety wire pliers. Pretty sure I've seen those before and wondered what the heck they were. I know. Tight? Yeah. What's the point of doing that? Makes it impossible for that bolt to come loose. What? Oh, well, hopefully, it doesn't come loose, because then we ain't shifting. I thought the same thing the first time I saw it. Oh, why did you need to get it? I didn't need to get it. Grandpa got it when he worked in the Air Force.

See, it seems like everybody was in the Air Force or whatnot back then. Oh, that's quiet. Feel bad for the next people to work on that. That'd be, yes dude. Safety wire to go-go. We don't have a shift cover access cover, but whatever. Access cover? Yeah, the cover that goes over the top. Have one? I don't know. Possibly. Can't recall seeing it anytime soon. I—I don't remember seeing it.

Well, guess what? EMPI does make those covers new. Wow. One of those in there? Why? And it's powder-coated. Also, a good job. All right. Not that we're going to start the engine up or do anything driving-wise, but for storage reasons—to make more room in the garage—we’ll get the engine in and put the bumper on. That way, we have a little bit more room on that side, and we can go through and do some cleanup.

All right, I don’t know why I'm doing this instead of Nathan. You need to come over here and pack some bearings, okay? So then we can start with our inner—throw them in there, squeeze that thing until you get all that grease in. Not all of it, but some of it. We're not all that far from driving this thing if—if—if we do choose that we want to drive it. I'm not entirely sure. Maybe, maybe not. This goes on the inside. That slides into the inside. Great.

All right, grab the other bearing, stick it there, and pack it on that side. All right, correct order of orientation. We have our axle, we have our inner spacer with the bevel towards the inside—just in case you're wondering. Then it goes through our bearing, and then through our spacer. Then it goes through our outer bearing, and then the outer spacer with the original setup as far as backing plates and drum brakes, etc. It sits like that. But basically, you want to make sure that this edge rides inside your wheel seal, but other than that, it doesn't really matter, orientation-wise, as long as it sits squarely in the seal.

That doesn’t sound very good. No, it doesn’t sound good at all.

All right, so we got our snap—well, first off, we got our bearing. Then we got our snap ring, which I can see that it's all seated. But if you're ever in doubt, just make sure and grab me the inner seal. The other one? Yep. Slide that onto there, and that guy can slide in there. Nice.

All right, axle spacer, because we are running disc brakes. Wait, we are running disc brakes? We are running disc brakes. Running disc brakes and parking brakes, like so. Oh, look at that. My car's back together. Our bracket will slide in there, and all that should be good.

There’s dirt all over our control arm. Oh, man. Oh well, we’ll get more dirt. Grab a bracket. They both should be the same on those. You might need the—oh yeah, I might need the wrench in your hands, too. Yeah, for anybody assembling the brakes, make sure to grease your brake pads extra greasy brake pads. Yeah, they have to be greasier, or else they won't let you stop. And never use brake cleaner on brakes. I know it sounds like it's brake cleaner, but it isn't. The worst is ever.

All right, caliper. You mean all the other pieces? Well, caliper and pads, but yeah, there we go. Well, at least now, when we get the car on wheels again, we'll at least be able to hold it in place. Yeah. Perfect parking brake, because street car. That caliper is all hooked up, other than the brake lines.

There, I think that was that sides. This one can go from there. It would have originally gone to there, but we can do some rebending. Never mind our custom brake line bends. We'll have to redo those with some fresh brake lines, but for now it will do the job. More, more, more, actually yeah that should be good. We clear? Yep, oh it looks so good Dad. See here with the cage and everything just in the red noise. Yeah. All right we got one side done we're going to do the same thing on the other side.

A couple of hours later, after a quick trip to Kyle’s to get a rear wheel seal that was missing, it's finally back on its own weight—this time with rear suspension and rear shocks. We've got everything set. She’s on her own weight and actually feels really good. The back sits a little bit taller than the front right now, which is good, because once the body’s on, it should sit good.

At this point, we have a complete rolling chassis, and Nathan's acting like a monkey. Yeah, obviously, your roll cage isn’t all bolted in, but there we have it. Now that this is complete, we are going to shift attention to the body. There are two shows: Edge Finder’s Bug Bloom and then Desert Dub’s fourth annual show coming up. That Desert Dub show was the first show that we took Nathan’s car to—that was actually April 20th last year.

Anyway, long story short, we’re going to shift attention to that body. We aren’t going for show quality. We aren’t going for perfect bodywork. We aren’t going for mirror reflections. We’re going to paint this thing with farm and implement tractor paint and the cheapest paint gun we could find on Amazon.

Because we're going to do the air conditioning and electric power steering I'm going to have to do a quick mockup of that stuff so we're going to work on that. We're going to work on the fuel filler door. And then we are going to get working on minimal body work. We're going to give it a quick block. It's just, this is his first car at 14 years old—bought it at 12, though. He bought it at 12. This is his first car. It’s not going to be a perfect show car, but it is going to be completely restored. Some things could be better. Some things are pretty darn cool. I know like AC and parking brake, even the parking brake. Just check out the detail at back of this thing. Obviously we've got work to do back there. The air conditioning is not going to be done for the show. Uh chances are it's not even going to have, you know, roll up windows and vent wings. We will have a windshield in it probably, because I want to drive this down to at least Bug Bloom. That's only about 20-25 minutes away so that's doable. Next step is we're going to do some quick work on that body to try and at least get the body painted and ready for a good assembly.

On that note, thanks for watching. I’m Sam. And I’m Nate. And life’s full of good people—if you can’t find one, be one. Later, guys.