Father & Son Build - Parking Brakes + More Chassis Work

The chassis work continues on Nate's Baja Bug and with the decision made to hook up the parking brakes, Sam and Nate team up on making custom tabs, brackets and even customize a couple of bolts. All so that the conversion disc brake calipers can be installed on the aftermarket 3x3 trailing arms. All though the "custom" bolt wasn't really ideal, in the end, the father-son team got the set up installed and working properly. That wasn't something that either expected to work as well as it did, very cool!

With the parking brakes and calipers installed, fitting both AC hard lines is completed & the rear chassis to body brace is modified to fit around them. The brace is patched up from the modifications needed for the Bus transmission, cover plates are made for the holes in the tunnel, and while Sam was making a pick-up run to California, Nathan got most of the inside of the tunnel treated with some rust converter. All in all, a very productive few days and it gets the duo one step closer to a complete chassis!

Video Transcript

All right. Hi, everybody. I'm Sam. And I'm Nate, and we're going to get back to work again.

This is fall in Phoenix, which means absolutely nothing because it’s still been over 100 + degrees for the last couple of weeks. We had one weekend of nice weather where it said, “Ha! Fall is coming here,” and then it said, “No, I’m not. Bye!” Today, we’re only at 98 degrees, so it's better. Next week is actually supposed to be in the 70s, so that’ll be really nice.

But anyway, the goal for today is to get these parking brake calipers hooked up and rewelded on. We’ve got both parking brake cables in place, and then we won’t need a parking rock. Nathan has already gone through and restored and painted his handle, cleaned it up, and painted it a nice red because red is stock. He wanted that to be red, so he did all that. That's all back to normal now. We’re going to jack up the back end of this car, pull off the rotors, pull off the drums, pull off the bearing caps, put in the spacers that I actually have cut down now, and get all that stuff mocked up before we attach the calipers again for the final, maybe final, mock-up time. And then we’ll weld the tabs on and get all that stuff set, so that’s what we’re going to do today.

So this is our original caliper bracket—what’s remaining of it—cut down to shape. Now that will sit over that. You can see this is where the original eyelet for the parking brake caliper cable would have hooked into. That’s out of the way, so now that can sit on top of that. It doesn’t hit there, and eventually, this will run through there, hook up to that, and then pull our caliper or parking brake down to hold our caliper in place. So now I just need to come up with a bracket for this hold-back down here, make another one for that side, and then we can work on getting an eyelet to hold this in place on the trailing arm. Hopefully, everything except for the shocks should be good back here. Yep.

There, hanging out like that. Then, well, let’s get some cardboard aided design. There’s some liquid in there—yeah, probably brake fluid, something like that. Here, something like that probably works, right? You’re working on it. I’m guessing this is almost perfect. Yeah, this will work, something sort of similar to that. All right, it gets me in the ballpark, so I’ll just tack that on—ooh, that was hot. Yeah, that might do something like that. Grab that other tab out of there, ’cause if I’m cutting one, I might as well cut two.

We’ve got our parking brake working. I’ve got this bolt cut down to a 15 mm head, and I just shortened it about a quarter inch so I can put it in behind that. So now we’ve got a parking-brake-equipped 3x3 trailing arm. I’m okay with that. Nate, do me a favor—come hit that parking brake, buddy. Yeah, buddy! Yay, perfect. All right, hold on, let me switch this view. All right, hit it. There we go—hit it. That’s not ideal, having to use a wrench to barely get that bolt in place with that bracket in place. But yeah, now everything we did here, we’ve got to do on that side. But hey, we already know it works, so that’s one step in the right direction. Hit the parking brake, and then it’ll do.

Now I’ve got to make another custom bolt, shorten it, and turn it into a 15 mm head, and everything else is made for the other side—brackets, tabs, and whatnots.

Well, at least we got the brakes and the parking brake to work. We’re just going to go all the way down and see where it’s sitting. A little bit of camber, and it’s also still sitting higher than stock. Rolling, rolling, rolling! This buggy is rolling—hopefully sometime this year we’ll drive it again. I see something that maybe we can do—box in that nose cone.

This is actually open from here all the way up to here, so I’m going to weld that seam up. That’ll give us some extra support in this tunnel, and I’ll weld that in place there to start boxing in this mount. I’ll do the same thing on the bottom side later. I’m going to weld up this little seam right here that I had cut up earlier when we cut the stock mount out. I’ll weld that seam I cut when I was moving our accelerator cable tube and our clutch cable tube—yeah, that, that, that, and that. Get all those welded up, and that’s the majority of the stuff here.

Honestly, I don’t think I’m going to have to box this in here. All this strength transfers back to here, and we’ll have our rear subframe back here for our shock towers. Boxing in where I cut over for our AC lines shouldn’t be a big deal. Time will tell, of course, but for now, we’ll let it be. I’ll do some welding.

Here we go—that’s welded up, that’s welded up, that’s welded up, and that’s welded up. I’d already gone through and welded up the seams here and there. Looking pretty good.

All right, air conditioning line here, but now I need to create a bend in this guy. Hopefully, I can get this line bent properly; it’s pretty hard. I think you guys know that line is hard.

So, are we going to have hard lines at the engine or just soft lines?

Soft lines probably. Doesn’t look as cool, but oh well. Hard lines—I don’t know. We’ll try. All right, so I want to do more along the lines of that one. Bends super nice.

Now that I’ve got my air conditioning lines in place, got a little hole test-drilled there, everything’s in place in the back and the tunnel junction here. The other junction is just back here. Everything up here is in place, bolted in, bolted in. I wonder if, with that back crossmember in place, I can actually get these lines out with the hole drilled the way I have it. Let’s find out. We’ll start with the small one. Obviously, this would be much easier without the body in the way, but is it feasible? That’s the big question here. I need to make that hole a little bigger, but if it was bigger, it would be possible. I got it all the way up to there. Let’s open this up a little more. There we go.

We are good to go. So I can weld this piece back in place, and we can still get all of our lines and connections in place all the way up to there. And an operating parking brake with 3x3 control arms—that’s pretty darn slick. I had to custom-make 15 mm heads because the 17 mm wouldn’t clear this trailing arm. I had to shorten the bolt because that tab for the parking brake caliper comes in right in line with it. I couldn’t use an Allen bolt because I couldn’t get an Allen head in there because this is in line. Just a whole bunch of fun, but we’re there, and we’re there.

We’ve got a pretty decent setup, a decent amount of work done today. There was a lot of cutting, grinding, and customization to get custom bolt heads, lengths, tabs, brackets, and clearance for the calipers. But at the end of the day, we’ve got parking brake cables on 3x3 trailing arms, and it doesn’t roll—no rocking, no rolling. Yay!

We’ve got our rear body support in place, and our air conditioning lines are hooked up front and back. I have this taped in place just to make sure that, through the new hole I drilled, I can get the lines in and out smoothly—and I can. So, the next step is to patch up a couple of extra holes in this from when I relocated and moved the accelerator cable and clutch cable tube.

We tested paint, and we picked out a paint color for the suspension; it looks pretty good. I think we’ll go a little darker than that for the chassis and use that color on all the suspension. Any moving stuff will be that color, then orange for the bug, and hammered silver for the bumpers. Give it a little sparkle.

Quick update for today—I got a cap made for this, just screwed in place temporarily. Actually, this one, since we’re not going to have to get in there a whole lot, I’ll probably just leave these sheet metal screws in place. On the backside here, I’ve got our rear mount cross brace, got a new piece of sheet metal patched in there. If it was a piece of body metal, I’d actually care about finishing it better, but this will just be up underneath, in front of the transmission. That’s ready to go. Maybe during the week, Nathan can work on painting inside the tunnel, getting all of that corrosealed up. If he’s looking for something to do, he can do that.

In the meantime, Nathan, what are you doing?

Working on the car—not the bug.

Up here, I want to put two more nutserts in place, but I ran out since I’ve used them all at work. I’ve got a plate made; it’ll be six screws holding this in place. That’ll be access for our AC lines and our clutch cable when the occasion calls for replacing or installing them. From here, Nathan, you just got to corroseal inside this tunnel, and then we can start working on putting these pans in place.

Other than that, I’m still waiting for my new welder to come in so that I can TIG that, that, and those in place. I want to do those with TIG instead of MIG—just looks a whole lot cleaner. Even though I don’t have much experience with it, I’ll try and figure it out. Need to get the suspension subframe in. Oh, I actually got our spring plates marked so I know where to cut them for more travel because we want all the travel.

Looks like Nathan’s been busy at work on our chassis. We can still do a little bit more up there on the corroseal, but all in all, did a pretty good job getting everything sealed up with the wonderful rust converter corroseal. Pretty much like anything else, all it does is convert rust to black oxide or something like that. Anyway, I like it as a nice, for lack of a better term, primer and a rust converter to get rid of that rust.

Well, I’ve been out in California getting the 62 23 window, and Nathan’s been working on this, so hopefully, at least by the end of the year, the chassis should be done. Hopefully, the chassis will be done. And then it’s full steam ahead. I’m trying to get that body back, get the bodywork done, get some paint done, and try to find some orange—yeah, orange tractor paint.

Basically like, um, what’s that one brand again that has the orange tractors? Kota. Yeah, Kota orange. May that Kota orange Baja. All right, all right, so on that note, I’m Sam. And I’m Nate. And life’s full of good people. If you can’t find one, be one. Later, guys.