This will be a short post, and unfortunately without pictures. I’ve been working at trying to form the strips to match the contour of the top and bottom edge of the side pieces, and in doing so I’ve realized that with the tools that I have, there is no way I will be able to achieve a perfectly straight bend (with the bend axis perfectly perpendicular to the strip itself), which would have been the advantage to forming them to the proper shape before attempting to attach them.

So, at this point, I don’t see any reason why not to go with my earlier idea, which was to fit up both sides and then simply bend-tack-bend-tack progressively down the length of the strips. Where the strip bends in a way that causes it not to be straight side-to-side, a hammer will have to sort it out. If this is confusing, I hope it becomes clearer when I start doing it and post pictures of the process.

One potential gotcha is the attachment of the front suspension mounts, which I will have to do sooner if I take this path. They’ll be welded to a piece of box tube that’s 2 inches long to fit between the side pieces. I’ll need to do that bit of welding first, and then weld the box tube in place, which promises to be tricky. Again, pictures of all of this are needed.

I spent this evening grinding, which is my least favorite part of welding. There’s probably something I’m not doing right, but I’ve been using my angle grinder with flapwheel disks, grinding disks, wire brushes and regular sanding disks and no matter what tool I use, getting the edges bright and free of mill scale is a laborious, time-consuming process. After looking around I’ve noticed that the typical recommendations for this are A) sandblasting, and B) acid dip. I’m going to try picking up some high-speed nylon mesh abrasive disks from McMaster Carr, but I’m not going to keep my hopes up too much for a silver bullet solution.