Gray Goats Rod and Custom

 Further work on the frame today.  Started by clamping the left and right rails together and marking them for the vertical angle cuts necessary to follow the body lines. Clamping them together for marking eliminates possible side to side errors assuring a mirror image left to right. Just for fun I set the grill shell in position and measured to get an approximation of the difference between the height of the grill and the height of the firewall I'll start cutting tomorrow but before I did I made cardboard templates the same width as the fame rails and cut the angle in them to be sure the resulting joint would keep the frame within the layout lines.  The results.... PERFECT :)!

  The main steel is here, I picked up some 2x4 tubing, a 2” forward section and a front perch from Ron Pope Motor sports.   All were waiting on now is some custom cut curved rear plates that will be explained in greater detail

  When I bought the ends I used to make the fuel tank I bought three with the intent of using one as an air cleaner cover.  I had no idea how HEAVY they would be!  I still wanted the shape but knew there was no way I wanted to put that much weight on top of the carb.  So improvise it is.  I used the remaining tank section to make a mold Following the wax and application of part-all I laid in two layers of 3/4 oz matt and ended up with an almost exact replica of the shape I wanted but in a part weighing only a tiny fraction of the original steel unit :).  It did require a small amount of filler and sanding  After a little primer was on it was ready to go on the shelf until the day I'm ready to put it to use

 One element true of all hot rod owners and in particular bucket roadster owners is their desire to be unique.  While the C-bucket will be unique by virtue of its body style I wanted something else to set it apart from the crowd.  Some buckets have concealed tanks, some have round dune buggy style or beer keg tanks and still others stand out for their exposed custom square or tractor sourced tanks.  I'm taking the C-bucket in a slightly different direction with a widened motorcycle style tank.  I started with some tank half stampings which arrived with their flanges still in place This left me with a challenge.  How to cut the flanges off with common tools while maintaining edges which were both straight and square.  The result was the redneck metal router.  A piece of wood was clamped to my welding table, an old skilsaw with a metal cutting blade was clamped to the edge of the table suspending the blade just off the table and the results were ple...