Video Transcript

All right, I don't know how long it's been since we last filmed a video. We've been busy doing things and stuff, but we're back at it again.

We've got our rear bumper kind of tacked, kind of relatively decently welded in place. Now, we're going to remove the bumper, which Nathan's already started. It might be kind of warm—yeah, hard is still a little bit warm. We're going to pull the engine out of the way, put the bumper back in place, weld everything back up, and then maybe we'll get to mounting our air conditioning condenser and some other stuff. So, enjoy!

All right, now is the time that I need to do some research to see what's the high side and what's the low side. That's suction, that's pressure. Let's do some research on some AC systems. All right, so from our compressor to our high side, to our low side, to our dryer, to our line through the tunnel, to the evaporator, from the evaporator back up to the compressor. The large one like that is fairly easy to bend. Obviously, that needs to be on the high side, and we want to give our starter plenty of room for our hoses. Something like there may come off of our shock tower, the tab bolt that there at the bottom, and then we'll work up from there.

Well, there you are—nice to see you join the party! I'm trying to get this thing centered in here, left to right. Let's just go right there. How's that looking? I got about three inches, two to two and a half from that side. What do you have from here to here? About three? Yeah, all right, give me a ten. Approximately two and a half inches, more or less.

All right, that—oh, that's hot! You know what? That's why I have a bucket of water right here. Cool off! You go to your room and cool off, or go to that bucket and cool off. You know what's kind of weird? The two on that side—it's like curved.

Do we need these, Nathan? Um, maybe? I don't know. I can't think of anything in the world why in the heck I would need those. And closing the door would be a pain in the butt, so no, I don't need them. On the bottom, nutty and bolty go to the shock tower. Play around with it, kind of get an angle where we want.

I mean, that looks good just right there. Well, other than your side was too high. Here we go. I have mine all the way at the bottom. There—you? Yeah. Shoot, really perfect. Still got clearance on the transmission. We've got room up top. Yeah. So are we just going to weld it directly there? Possibly? Okay. I mean, we could probably just directly weld it right there. I'm okay with this. I've got plenty of room for our starter wire and solenoid right there. We've got room for our brake lines, room for all that. Tack it in before we lose the spot here. Hold it right there. I'm going to measure the top distance—basically at the seven, and not quite seven. Oh yeah, I guess they're both not quite seven. Yep, that's good right there.

Yep—boom! Wow. Now we're going to put my piece of flat plate again. Oh, there it is. All right, losing the flat plate, losing the flat plate. The bend from there straight up to there. Put a fan here. Not exactly a whole lot of room in there for a fan, buddy.

All right, well, I was wondering where Nathan was. He's busy making pizzas right now, so I might be back tonight. I might not be back tonight. We will see. At this point, the air conditioning condenser is mounted, the bumper is all mounted, fully welded in, all bolted in. We've got our custom tube for our accelerator tube through there—that's awesome.

Kind of the next big step I need to do is put the body on so I can figure out where the mounting plates for the rear two legs of the roll cage are going to go. Then I can get those drilled, marked, and everything else from the rear legs with the body in place. I want to make certain that I have room for my receiver dryer where I want to put it—basically just inside of the shock tower, in between this bar and the shock tower. It's a tight fit under there. Not really a whole lot of room for fans. If it needs it, I might be able to stick one on this side, like Nathan pointed out.

At least this is going to be drawing a lot of air through here, heating the air a little bit. Yeah, so not ideal—we're drawing hot air into our fan and then over the engine. But we live in Arizona; it's hot anyway. So what are you going to do? At least we will be cool inside—hopefully, assuming I can get this air conditioning to work. I'll be back at some point—maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe Sunday, maybe another day. God knows. We'll be back eventually.

All right, it is the next day. I did make it back. Now I'm going to pull the bumper, pull the engine, try and leave the air conditioning condenser in place. It should be fine. The body should come over. Hopefully, we're not going to drop the body. I'm going to pull that off just in case the body gets kind of silly and decides to drop in there. I don't want to damage that condenser, so I'll pull that out. Yeah, let's get all this stuff pulled apart and make way for the body to go in place.

Oh, look who decided to show up. One guess—

I can't get much leverage from there. What are we running into there versus there? Nothing. I don't know. I guess let's try the back. What, the chassis? Yeah. Like, put it down right here real quick—further than that, even further than that. Like, okay, that—yep, there you go. Clear the stand. Barely. Is it secure enough? Barely. Hopefully... barely.

So, it needs to also go where the other one was. Good. Here. Perfect. I try to get a line lined up on this line right here. Maybe I should just—there we go. Yay! Get that out of here and then blow out underneath here. It looks so sketchy. Yeah, I'm like just sitting—all these—woo.

Apparently, it's pretty tight on that side. Just so weird. Is this how they do it at the factories? Oh, I'm sure it's exactly how they did it at the factories. At least the bug is like all the way the heck up there.

All right, bring it out, up, over—woo, not quite in the right spot. Well—oh yeah, I guess the front was kind of holding it. Gravity is in the right spot. Wow, my car's together again! What's a quickly solid thing, though? Actually, not that bad.

Ouch! That was only my hand in the way.

Oh, you get strong enough, I guess. Just—I'm not tall. I mean, I've been able to pick this thing up forever. Check inside, should be good. It is—worse? No, right here. Do the—up, there we go. It's pretty good. See? That worked well enough on a holder.

There. All right, next step is to scrap that inside, all the junk. Yeah, I think the SC screwdriver, like the big screwdriver.

Is this how they did that? Like, I got that—oh, there's a lot of dust in here. That's a lot of dust!

It's a car in here! It's a car? Are you sure it's a car? I thought it was a Volkswagen.

Let's throw those bars in place, and something right about right there. Close, going to get to that outside edge. You want to grab me a Sharpie from the drawer? And a center punch? And—I guess the center punch too? Sure, that.

All right, this thing out pretty much as far as we can get, right? Or—I don't know, need to grab the rear hoop maybe? Just in case? Yeah, grab that rear hoop. Probably need to build the cage.

This is exactly how it welded. Perfect—wow, it actually went in.

All right, well, guess what? For now, let's put that up in place over there by the rear seat, right? Well, that—feel? You're about to have one, right? I don't care. Well, you did before. And I'm going to say, let's try to have—re—put it behind the two on the outside bottom right there. And I push that back—back as far as we can. Perfect. All right, hold it there.

Hook this over the top of the cage, like hook it back to itself. And you know what? I guess I'll use this side here. You get it? Yeah, it's German steel, so it's not going to break that much. Perfect. Roll cage.

All right, I wish we had a rear seat crossbar. Do we happen to have one, Nathan? This little bar—I mean, I know that we kept it. I'm going to probably want to move these guys in. Not quite to where these tubes are, but close. That's probably as happy as that wants to be right there.

So I can work on marking these guys, getting some plates to match. Um, okay. I guess we just drill the body up here and temporarily kind of bolted through the back to see where the plate's going to go, maybe?

Yeah. Where's the other one? The other one? One, two.

Oh, we need to get the back of this car jacked up and held up far enough so we can get it in there and work in those back.

Can you put—oh, a couple more inches? Uh, there we go. Definitely not the best thing in the world. All right—woo, that's precarious. Yeah. Grab your one, pull the collar out.

That. I'm going to try to lift it some more. If you can put that up underneath there, perhaps? Maybe. Going to knock that—there we go. It's a bit better.

Woo, that was fun!

And now we've got an area where we don't need to put a plate in. Go like that, mark that off, mark the holes, drill—Sharp inside. You go around the other side of the car, mark our holes.

Hopefully got some seat belt holes in here. Sucks that orange is in California. Storage.

Now I don't have to worry about that plate. No, but we do have to worry about clearancing—clearancing the bottom side through a nut. That's easy, we just have to drill a hole. All right, I get the unit bit, I'll get the unibit, and you can do the—actually, we have more drills, don’t we? I can do one side, and you can do the other. You take that one.

What are we doing?

We're going to have to drill those things good enough to the point where you can get this bolt in—that, that, and this one.

The clutch is going bad. Yep.

That's good. Have to lift that out. You have to get that out. Ready, set.

All right, pull that block out. Out? Right. I'll just bolt everything in place, see if it works. Yeah, just get the nut off and get started.

Here we go. That's awesome.

Our plate is set in place there, there. We'll get it tacked in, in a moment. On the inside, try to get that straightened out as much as possible on this plate. End up in there. We got the same thing done on that side.

Want to make sure that we have enough room for the crossbar at the rear of the seat. It's basically like right in line with the floorpan, pretty much.

Yeah, that looks good.

At which point, we need to drill those and get that mounted down there, but I don't really want to do that until I have the, uh, thing things in place. Yeah, but I don't want to do anything until we get a rear seat crossbar in from Kyle.

Oh, hi. It's a new day.

So, from Kyle, we got a new rear seat crossbar, or new to us anyway. This bar is from the yellow crushed car that we still haven't picked up from his house because he's still pulling parts off of it. So we've got that bar in. Now, Nathan is getting the floor pans bolted in underneath at least a decent amount so then we can know that we're good as far as clearance.

Yeah, then we can get the bottom of our B-pillar bolted in place there.

Yeah, that's good. And—are you going to get that side?

Yeah, just two, right?

Once we get that bolted in and that bolted in, then we can start making our tubing coupler connections up at the top side.

And we do have the body bolted in there and there, so the back of the car is slightly assembled—kind of. Yeah, you can see on the backside we've got all this put in, which is just kind of temporarily sitting there, but it is what it is. As usual, there's a new plan of attack because, well, Nathan wants to drive the car like now. So, we're going to spend the next couple of weekends and weeknights, whenever possible, getting this thing back to operational driving so we can take it out to the desert to Geyser Loop, and he can drive his car finally.

Um, it'll also kind of give us a chance to do some mockup on some other things, like the air conditioner up underneath the dash, uh, possibly electric power steering. So, it's not necessarily a bad thing because there are a whole bunch of parts that I've never actually put onto a car, and I don't know how they're going to install. So, everything's kind of loose. I want to make certain that I can access both of our coupler bolts, so I'll have this—I can get one bolt here and one bolt here. Right there seems really happy now, so I don't burn my fingers.

All right, got that side in. We got that side in. We've got two tacks, two tacks, two tacks on everything. Now, we're going to, uh, unbolt it from the car, and then we're going to take this thing out and get all these seams all welded up. Notice that we don't have any front tubes for the roll cage. I think for now we've decided we're not going to run front legs. Uh, this isn't a race car; we're not going crazy off-roading. And the hard part is, unless we cut the dash, you can't actually get your window cranks to operate because the roll cage takes up that space where you would actually end up rolling your windows down. So, uh, we did look into doing power windows—that's still something I want to play with, maybe eventually. But for today, uh, and for this first rendition, most likely we're not going to be doing that. But anyway, let me get these tubes out and weld it up, and we'll show you what we've got when we're all done.

All right, got that guy and that guy all welded up. Now I just got to do the legs, and then we'll go put it back in the car and see how she looks.

All right, so it has been a boatload of work in this video. We got the rear bumper done. We got the rear subframe drilled for the accelerator cable tube. Uh, and then we started working on all the tubes and supports for our show cage—roll cage—whatever we're going to call it. Uh, for liability reasons, it's sold as a show cage. We'll still have to drill two more holes on the back sides once we get the body off so we can clear the heater ducts.

So anyway, we're going to reassemble the car again. We're going to get it running and driving so somebody can go drive his car for the first time. That's about all we have done. But Nathan—we've got a cage! Yeah, maybe we shouldn't do that while we're sitting on jack stands, but the back—but we've got a cage! It is fully bolted in—well, minus two bolts on the bottom row. Yeah, but it's solid. Nathan's hanging from it. Yeah, it is bolted into our subframe, which ties into the chassis. Uh, and then bolted into the floor pans. And then we're going to plate that on the bottom side, but we'll get that in the later video.

So, uh, with that, we're going to call it a video. Thank you guys for watching, and life's full of good people. If you can't find one, be one.

Later, guys

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