Making a Car Spit….

Not literally… this is how I made a rotisserie to mount a car body so that it is easily rotated to any angle to make it easy to access the underside primarily for cleaning, repairing rust and painting without getting covered in muck.

1. Find some scrap 2″ square box section to make the end supports. Weld together as shown.

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2. Fabricate the swivel/pivots bits. A short square section is where the shell will bolt onto the spit. A couple of offcuts of old galvanised iron pipe – approx 1 1/4″ diameter was used. I found some tube that they just about fitted in. A few minutes on the lathe to bore out the outer tubes to get a good fit.

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3. Close up of the welds. It was all arc welded in my best joined up welding – it will carry quite a lot of weight so need to make sure its not going to snap!

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4.  Leg 1 complete. The castors are heavy duty industrial ones with hard nylon wheels. I fitted one braked caster to each end.

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5. Next is the inserts to the legs, this was some box section that slide quite nicely into the leg section. I then profiled the top to accept the pivot tubes.

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6. Check the fit before welding!

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7. Leg complete with insert. The insert can be raised or lowed to get the shell the right height.

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8. Close up of the pivot.

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9. Spindle mounted to a body shell – this shell is a 1955 Standard Eight I am supposed to be restoring.

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10. Slightly in the wrong order but this pic shows the spindle welded onto the support bar.

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11. A couple of brackets and a bit of angle were used to support the rear of the shell.

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12. Dexion was used as an easily adjustable “interface” to the spit mount. Some trial and error is needed to get the mounting height correct so that the centre of gravity is in the middle – getting it right makes it easier to rotate the shell.

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13.  Finshed Spit with shell mounted on it. There is a 2 1/2″round tube between the bottoms of the two support legs. All bolted together with M12 bolts.  Just a coat of Red paint need to make it look “professional”.

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14. It works – put the shell at any angle!

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15.  At this point I discovered a miscalculation in that the roof hits the tie bar. so I had to demount the body and lift up the mounting bars on the legs.

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All in all a really useful bit of kit, should have made one years ago. The castors make it easy to move the shell around. When not needed the centre bar is unbolted and the whole lot occupies only a little space in the corner of the garage.

Let the welding begin……..rebirth of the AX

 

It gets worse before it gets better! I started on the worst looking bit, the front near side chassis leg where it runs down under the footwell. Basically I used a hammer and old 1″ wood chisel the remove the factory undrseal. This revealed the the full extent of the corrosion – so I thought! So I cut out the rusty metal with an angle grinder. I started removing the bottom of the chassis box section, I could then see inside. It was quite shocking to see that the sides had rotted as well – the rot was from the inside out – meaning that to the casual observer all looks OK.

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This pic shows the extent of the rotten metal.

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And another.

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With the bad stuff gone, time to start a reconstruction – shame you can’t DIY 3D print steel yet! First bit was to build up the two sides of the box section.

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Make a paper template and transfer this to the metal sheet. As this is a chassis section I’m using 1.2mm thick steel sheet. The sheet is a zinc coated one – trade name of this particular stuff is Zinctec. Basically a corrosion resistant weld through zinc finish – approx £18 for a 1m x 1m sheet. For body work and other non structural bits you can get away with 0.8mm thick.

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Measure twice, cut once, goes the old adage. So before you cut the steel sheet double check your paper template is correct.

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Steel sheet marked up ready to cut out. You can just about cut the steel with aviation snips but I use my bench sheers to rough out the section. Any bits that aren’t quite right I trim up with the angle grinder.

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Got carried away and forgot to take some more pics. This shows both sides welded in. I’ll tidy the welds up later where required using the grinder. Note I have continuously welded all the joints rather than just spotting them.

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Now I need to make a long strip and curve it roud to close up the box section.

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Again I made a paper template. Before closing the box section off I sprayed the inside with Zinc rich weld through paint (I bought a few cans from Frosts when it was on offer a few weeks ago.) Really good stuff.

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New piece ready to weld up, all edges carefully trimmed to fit well so its easy to butt weld all round.

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As this is curved piece I started by tacking one end and tesing it round the curve and then tacking the other end when happy with the fit.

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Getting there, one end fully welded.

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Now welded all along one edge. Will roll the shell over on the spit to get a good angle on the other side. Note the welding is improving as I get into it again!

Next time finishing off the second layer.

 

 

Why did I Start This? – Full extent of rust revealed.

With the shell mounted on the spit it was wheeled outside and pressure washed so I could see how bad and how much rust there is.

 

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Pressure washed, ready to look at

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Front nearside chassis leg – common rot spot. The square hole was covered by a plastic cover under the underseal!

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This is the worst bit the main chassis leg rotten right through – worryingly all hidden by the factory underseal.

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Closer view!

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Back end is better,

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The rear is pretty solid, even the sills weren’t as bad as I first feared but will still need a lot of patching.

 

 

Spit Roast Citroen AX

The car is now stripped down, there is quite a lot of rust which needs cutting out and new metal welded in. As always most of this is on the more inaccessible underside. There is nothing worse than trying to clean up, cut out rust and weld up on the underside of a car. You end up covered in mud, paint, rust etc. and when it comes to welding it is hard to do a neat job whilst literally bending over backwards and looking up.  To overcome this a few years back I made a “rotisserie” or “car spit”. This is basically a cradle to which the car body is bolted, usually via the bumper mounting points – not on the AX though! – the cradle has pivots so the car body can be rotated. (not the best explanation so look at the pictures!).

1. The AX front bumper mounts are designed to crumple, deform and basically give up as soon as the car has a head on collision with a fly! So no chance of supporting the weight of the body on them. So I ended up drilling right through the front chassis legs, bolting on a spacer and a length of angle iron long enough to project forward past the bumper mounts. This gave two solid points to bolt another piece of angle between the two. This angle iron was then bolted to th front leg of the spit, The front of the car was lifted up on the gantry to the correct height to enable the spindle on the spit to locate with the leg.

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All ready to lift up onto the front leg of the spit

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Note the big “washers” to spread the load on the inside of the chassis leg

2. All lifted up, front end no engaged!

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3. The back end was then fixed to the rear leg. This was a lot easier as the cross beam just bolted to the rear bumper mounts which are a lot less “wafty” than the front ones.

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4. Pic of the rear end (car is mow on its side!

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5. Pic. of the front end (car still on its side.

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6. Final pic.

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7. The car car be moved to what ever angle I want. I might adjust the mounting height as the car is a bit top heavy at the moment. The legs are adjustable and I can lift the whole car higher so that it will rotate all the way round. The spit is also on castors so it is easy to wheel the body around to give lots or room where you are working.

 

It took about half a day to mount the body on the spit – worth the effort in my opinion as it will make it so much easier and quicker to clean and weld up.

 

Next time – the welding begins……..