Visually it looks like progress slowed down a lot this week but that I spent the
better part of a day doing the final welds on the chassis to get that big task
out of the way. I must have spent a solid 8-10 hours welding throughout
the week and weekend.

Once the bulk of the welding was done I could get on with the little stuff such
as relocating the ARB compressor from behind the passenger seat to under the
drivers seat (freeing up rear passenger legroom).

The fuel system is now all positioned and plumbed. I designed the brackets
that hold the pump and filter so they could be easily removed for servicing in
the field. Everything you see had to clear the rear seat so I had to mock
everything up with the seat in position and then pull the seat again to weld the
needed mounting cross members to the frame. At the same time I also marked where
I needed to weld the lower harness attachment tabs and installed those when the
seat was removed. The rubber fuel lines run to the upper link cross member on
the chassis, then connect to hard lines which run to the front motor mounts then
back to soft lines to the motor.

I added some plates front and back to the coilover mounting bracket on the frame
to beef up the area the bolt runs thru. I still want to box in these brackets as
well.

Out back I added some floor supports using some 3/4 x 3/4 box steel tubing.


On Sunday I pieced together the exhaust pipes. The rear section from the
previous build still fit but it was a tad short. I ended up cutting off
the tailpipe section from my original F150 exhaust (the tow rig now has a
Flowmaster cat-backsystem) and grafted it to the buggy exhaust pipes.

As usual I slipped the exhaust pipe into the muffler and left that union loose,
then hard mounted the exhaust pipe after the muffler.



In this final shot you can see I added some braces behind the front seats down
to the lower tubing, braces next to the rear seat and some funny shaped
bars behind the rear seat. The funny shaped bars fit the contour of the rear seat and
will provide a spot to anchor the shoulder harnesses.
From here I plan on painting the chassis in small sections so I can start some
of the re-assembly. I think it's safe to paint the fuel cell area and everything
from the rear seat forward. Next up is to make some templates for the floors,
rear skins, then finish welding all the bracketry on the rear axle housing. This
next week will be a busy one.
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