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Refreshing Glenlivet's ride

In the case of where the support started to break through the fiberglass, would the use of woven along with the mat given you a stronger repair?
 
In the case of where the support started to break through the fiberglass, would the use of woven along with the mat given you a stronger repair?

I used both woven cloth and mat in the repair. It was rock solid this morning. Given that the dimensions of the fractured glass exactly matched the outline of the small lift blocks I'm certain having multiple holes drilled during the initial assembly weakened the structure and the small contact area of the blocks just compounded the issue. I glassed the opposing half of the defect today (pix below) and instead of having two blocks of 2x4" each for the rear mounts I'll use one continuous steel tube measuring 3" (wide) 2" tall (lift) and 24" long to distribute the weight and stress across a much greater area. Between the metal and the fiberglass I'll use 3/16" thick fabric-reinforced stiff rubber. IMO that's how it should have been from the factory.

Yesterday's repair work was rock solid this morning. The more repairs I make the more confidence I have in facing additional issues. I'm just hoping that when the tub is perfect and the paint job makes me salivate that my many photos and notes will be sufficient for me to be able to put the whole thing back together! Because yesterday's repair was uneven (the nature of using fiberglass matting) and higher than the original grade, a couple hours of sanding using the long board were needed.
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I wasn't overly concerned with the low spots. They were only 1mm lower than grade when I finished sanding, and that aforementioned rubber spacer between the mount and the tub will accommodate any unevenness. A flat edge held between both mounting holes shows I have a perfectly flat surface to work with. At next year's rally if anyone wants to crawl beneath the tub to point out this defect, remember that Glenlivet has a habit of marking things at ground level!

For most of the morning I enjoyed the company of Miyagi-san's shop dog, Kolbock. He's just one year old but already 125# - much larger than my goldens but just as playful. He's also extremely vocal, often joining in when I sing along with songs on the radio.

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That thing's going to be one of the most perfect side cars around, when it's finished.

Till the first inevitable scratch!

Another very icy morning here in northern Vermont. Hoping the road up Miyagi-san's hill isn't too bad!
 
Today I worked on repairing the cracked subframe mount and reinforcing it. A V was ground into both sides of the crack, then both sides were TIG welded. My first shot at TIG, and while it's not the best looking weld I liked it; it felt a lot like the oxy-acetylene welding I toyed with in high school!

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Another first for me was using a plasma cutter to cut a patch out of a plate of 3/16" steel. After using it I wanted one for myself...till I looked up the price online! The patch was then ground to size, and the edges were beveled.

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I clamped it in place and scribed the location of the hole, drilled a 16mm hole in steps using Miyagi-san's milling machine (way cool toy!), then used the mounting stud to hold it in place for welding.

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Just a half day today as I had to plow our long driveway and our neighbor's after last night's moderate snowfall. I started by placing the clamshell and trunk lid in position to check for any gross misalignments, then with a bright light and strong reading glasses went over the tub from bow to stern looking for any minor flaws I'd overlooked. I found a few and circled them in pencil; ink and magic marker bleeds thru into the paint.

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Next I welded the 3/16" steel plate I'd fabricated yesterday over the damaged subframe mount, running a weld both to the subframe and around the edge where the new plate and the old damaged plate met. After that I ground down the edge weld and sandblasted it clean for priming tomorrow. Welding in a straight line sure is a lot easier than dealing with round stock! Though I'm satisfied with the welding, I have to admit it took Miyagi-San choosing the MIG settings for me...and a few pieces of scrap metal for practice before I tackled it.

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Throughout the morning 12 year old Shayna slept on her favorite spot over a bend in the radiant floor heat. She's completely deaf, but is very sweet and appreciates a good cuddle now and then.

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Nice weld for sure! Just make sure to remove all the weld splatter from the area prior to paint as it will create thin spots in the paint/coating and corrode faster...
 
Today I focused on the subframe. Started the day by chiseling off the weld splatter, placing the subframe on the dolly, then placing the new cross-members on the mounts. The 3/16 inch reinforced rubber pads were placed on top, then the sidecar tub was gently added for a test fit. Lowered, the tub fit with about a quarter inch clearance between the bottom of the truck and the swaybar. That gap will probably decrease once the tub is bolted into position, but I can add another layer of rubber to compensate. The lightbar, curved upwards when the tub was lifted, had to be removed and modified to fit the lowered hack.

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Satisfied that things fit (with the exception of the lightbar), the tub was placed back on the work table and as I bent over to removed the front cross-member I noticed yet another manufacturing error. There are two plates mounted forward to secure the bolts that tie the tub to the subframe. On the starboard side (left in the photo below) the plate is level with the top of the tube the lightbar slides into. On the portside (right in the photo) you can see it was welded about a quarter inch below the other side. You can see the resulting gap just below the piece of flat stock steel. I'll have to shim that to bring it level with the other side.

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I thought I was going to have to rebuild the lightbar from scratch, but having nothing to lose figured I'd try to beat this one into a useable shape. Before this rebuild the tub had been raised three inches, so just forward of the mounting points the lightbar had been bent up about 15 degrees. Using a rosebud torch on his oxy-acetylene rig, Miyagi-San heated the bend to red hot while I slipped a steel rod into the tubing and bore down with all my weight to straighten the bend. This resulted in a bit of bulging, but since it will be under the rig I could live with that. The lightbar now fit, but stuck way out in front of the tub at an unseemly shallow angle. I needed to increase the angle of the upward sweep of the lightbar about 20 degrees. We tried the same method - heat till it glowed then beat on it with a rubber mallet - but up front the steel was way thicker and it refused to bend. So we cut a V-notch into the tubing, heated it, then bent it. There was some memory to the steel so donning welding gloves I used all my weight to pull the bar back and down while Miyagi-San used the MIG welder to tack both sides into submission. After that I rubbed my sore arms while he finished welding the tubing, leaving all the grinding to me.

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Are you going to place rubber pads between the sub frame and the contact areas where it bolts to the tub?
 
Are you going to place rubber pads between the sub frame and the contact areas where it bolts to the tub?

Yes, see below. Today was a day of measuring, measuring again, counterpunching, then measuring again just to be sure. With the tub on one side I carefully positioned the new mounts, marked, measured, then milled the mounting holes.
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The mounts used previously were rather small, and I feel that scant surface area contributed to the breakdown of the fiberglass above it. It didn't help that it was metal on fiberglass contact with no rubber to cushion the blow. The photo below shows the original mounts at the top (stacked aluminum blocks with a 2x4" contact patch), compared to my replacement which is a 3" wide by 22" long piece of rectangular steel with 3/16" walls. It's half the height of the original blocks, so the tub will be an inch and a half lower to make mounting easier as my dog ages. Atop that will go the fabric-reinforced strip of 3/16" thick rubber to cushion the much larger contact patch.
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The photo below shows the OEM aluminum front mount. Originally it had a body lift in the form of two 2" long sleeves that really raised the nose. I'm omitting those and as you can see the flat steel bar I'm using is half the height of the bar it's replacing, and half again wider to distribute the stress over a greater area. It will also be topped with fabric-reinforced rubber for cushioning.
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Satisfied that my measurements were correct, I moved over to the milling machine, lined up my first punch, drilled a pilot hole then shifted to the other end and drilled the second. Switched the collet and bit to drill a 3/8" hole on both ends. Notice the tiny jackstand to keep the metal from deflecting as I drilled.
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Nice. That'll give the dogs a quieter ride, too. :)

Pete:

I was thinking, for your side vent, you could probably acquire an inner sliding port, or door, for it from an RV parts supplier. Then you could control the amount of air passing into the tub as the temperature varied.
 
Nice. That'll give the dogs a quieter ride, too. :)

Pete:

I was thinking, for your side vent, you could probably acquire an inner sliding port, or door, for it from an RV parts supplier. Then you could control the amount of air passing into the tub as the temperature varied.

The Hannigan actually comes with one. It worked well till fused solid by mud and bug guts. I have a replacement on hand.

The challenge is remembering to close it. Coming back from Missouri years ago we ran into pretty cold temps in Pennsylvania's Alleghenies. I was comfortable with several layers, but happened to glance down and noticed Barley was shivering violently. Had to pull over and cuddle him inside my sleeping bag for an hour! Now the vent is part of my pre-ride checklist.
 
There are times when you uncover something...and wish you could just put the cover back on and pretend you didn't see it. This is one of those days. I need to remove the sidecar wiring harness from the 2010 GSA and transfer it to the 2012 GSA. Sounds easy enough, right? Take good notes and plenty of photos on the old bike and use them to make connections on the new bike which is, afterall, the same generation of GSA. But it's never as easy as it should be. Upon removing the seat cowling I saw the evil Scotchlok connectors. I hate those things and feel they should be banned from use on any motor vehicle. In fact, I'd go so far as to wish I could curse the inventor of those nasty things with a lifetime of external thrombosed hemorroids, the big throbbing kind!

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As you can see, the splices were made all the way back to the tiny wires that power the tail, brake and turn signals. Not much room to work in. Also, the wires running to the sidecar are a significantly larger gauge than the tiny OEM wires, so I'm not sure a Posilock or Positap would work. I'll figure it out and with a comfy chair and some high powered reading glasses will eventually get those darned things off. I sure wish there was a little button built into the cursed things that would make them automatically release, though!

On the other end of the wiring harness I found sheer chaos. Of all the wires visible in the photo below, only the yellow wires used the same color on either end of the splices. Green is spliced to brown. Black is spliced to purple. Blue is spliced to white. So before disconnecting any of them I need to trace each wire to whatever they are tapped into on the bike and create a translate table so I can transfer the harness to the new bike.

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Wow.... I hope that electrical install was not done by a person who purports to be a professional.
 
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Who did that original wiring work? Maybe the Stevie Wonder Automotive Electrical Wiring Shop ? Might as well just do everything in black and then shrink wrap everything......twice. :scratch

Friedle
 
Those connectors tell me some amateur was at work. Crimp connectors are fine but they should be the marine kind that have shrink tubing making them waterproof. As to the other ones, they have no place anywhere but a trash can.
At least you can redo everything the right way like all the work you have done so far..:thumb
 
A couple of discoveries today. When the temp is minus 20F and the temp in the garage is minus 2F, those Scotchlock connectors are frozen stiff and difficult to work with. Got one off before my fingers got stiff from the cold. Fairly easy to remove, but the hard part is freeing the wire from the little metal guillotine without too much damage. I'll continue the job when the weather warms up to the point where the woodstove can create a comfortable working environment.

The second discovery is that at minus 20F Miyagi-San's shop heating system has a hard time. He uses radiant floor heating which is wonderful, but doesn't respond very quickly to setting changes. At 58F we were comfortable, but the temp was too low for any bodywork aside from sanding. Using my infrared heater I was able to heat small sections of the sidecar enough to work on, but it was slow going.

My first challenge was softening a curve on the portside of the nose. Hannigan's mold had a hard angle on that side and a much softer curve on the starboard side. I liked the soft lines, so used the DA sander to eliminate the hard chine then plastic filler to soften the curve. I'm getting pretty good at this, so the work went quickly.

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With the lines of the tub looking all sleek and sexy it was time to eliminate the tiny pinholes. I'd warm one section of two feet or so, use the blow gun to get dust out of every minute imperfection, then apply a thin layer of polyester glaze (icing). The glaze was much less viscous than filler, sort of like a watery cake frosting. One pass with considerable pressure to force the glaze into pinholes and sandpaper scratches,then another pass using less pressure to leave a thin film behind.

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After it dried in 20 minutes or so I sanded the rough edges with 80 grit, then dropped down to 120 and 180 grit. Because the temp forced me to work on small sections I'll save the final 280 grit sanding for after the entire tub has been glazed.

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I got a bit more of the tub glazed today, then took a break to help fix a neighbor's excavator. It warmed up to 21F today, and in the warm spell the locals scrambled to break up ice so the streams wouldn't overflow and flood homes. One hard working kid struggling to get his business off the ground broke his excavator so loaded it on a flatbed and brought it up to the shop to see if Miyagi-San could fix it well enough to let him take care of an emergency. We sandblasted the rusted parts outside, then brought it inside so my mentor could make temporary repairs. In an hour the kid was on his way with a big grin on his face. One of the things I love about rural Vermont is neighbors help each other simply because that's what neighbors do.

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Tired of sanding, I moved on to the tug's skidplate. The original was very narrow and the bottom of the bike as well as the subframe was always covered with road grime and parts of it sandblasted by grit kicked up by the front tire. I reused the pair of mounts from Claude's shop, but needed mounts in the rear so the aluminum plate wouldn't vibrate and drive me crazy on long rides. Instead of welding another cross-piece in the back, I used the milling machine to drill and tap holes in the aft subframe. Rubber bushings between the mounts and the skidplate will shield the soft aluminum from wearing through from all the vibration.

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One of the things I love about rural Vermont is neighbors help each other simply because that's what neighbors do.

I think living in an area with extreme weather conditions inspires that sort of behavior. I felt the same way about living in the interior of Alaska.
 
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