As you can see from the image above, Mercules has been getting a lot of our attention over the last week. We’ve managed to prep all the paint to be ready for the first coat of primer (hopefully she’s all primed this week).
Everything is ready bar two doors, they were just too rusted out on the bottom sill to even bother trying to fix. We have found some replacements which should be here by the end of the week.
We have also taken care of all the surface rust and minor holes which were
cut out and new pieces of *metal* welded in.
A booth of sorts was constructed, so that we could minimize the mess we make and have a good environment in which to prime Mercules. The booth is made out of $15 worth of plastic sheets from bunnings and a couple of pieces of builders string. Works an absolute treat too.
The stock exhaust cutout in the body work was going to be rendered
useless as we plan on dumping twin 2.5″ pipes directly under the number
plate. So a quick zap with the welder and a little bog and you’d never
know it was there.
Aerial hole removed, we’ll run an indash one as the stock one weighed
a tonne and looked like a bag of the proverbial.
The battery will be run in the boot, so we drilled out the spot welds, pulled
out the battery tray and sent Paul off to hospital to go on record as Merules’ very first victim!
Two stitches and Paul was a little tentative to go another round with Mercules (what a blouse).
New metal was welded into the engine bay, where the battery tray use to live.
Seems all battery trays are chock block full of rust. Anyone care to enlighten us on this one, is it something to do with the battery acid being corrosive?
As I was writing this entry, our gearbox arrived and looks like
it will be a very tight squeeze in the transmission tunnel! Box is a reco’d
Turbo 350 with Stage 2 shift kit, it’s going to be a cruiser for 99.99% of the
time, so there was no need to go full manualised on this one. We’ve sourced an engine (350 chev), which we’re hoping to pick up later on in the week. Then we’re ready to do a quick trial fit of both engine and box oooo exciting!
Anyways that’s where we are currently at with the Mercules project,
more updates in a weeks time.
| Mercules Build Up Part 2 Gallery |
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