Rear sub frame for seatbelt mounts

After going back to the certifer and asking about the seat belts I got a different story. I was told that I couldnt stay with lap belts that were in the car, Last time I went in I was told, No I needed full three point tension belts and a drive shaft hoop. Sigh.

This is a real pain as I had already got the engineer to weld in the rear cross member. But now that will need to be removed and I had to add in another.

I tried main different way of trying to use the old / new cross member, but at the end of the dat it was going to be easier to do the whole thing again.

The plus side is that getting the steel for this was easy, and it only cost $88 for 8m of 25mmx50mm3mm tubing.

So the first step was to remove the old / new rear cross member.

Old cross member cut out, Since it was welded in really well it was a to remove.

Now I was told that I needed two cross members, and that they needed to to tied together. So here I'm spacing them out. The rear cross member is where the belts will bolt into, and the front is for strength to the rear with the use of additional diagonal cross braces and also I positioned it so I can mount the drive shaft hoop off it.

The making of the two diagonal cross members to join the two new cross members

Tac welded before and after many test fits

Final welds and sitting in position, I kicked up the rear to give more clearance to the drive shaft.

Since I kicked up the rear I need to remove that from the extra floor plate I have glued on to the base of the floor. So after sitting the body back on the frame and marking where it need to be trimmed it was out with the hammer and chisel to remove the floor.

Once I had it removed I used the angle grinder with a sanding disk to tidy it all up.

All done

Made bit of a mess

Next steps is to weld the new cross member in place and double check all clearances.

So that was the long weekends work, two steps back one forward, I'll call it progress.

Upgrading ESXi for 3.5 ro 4

Well it was raining so couldn't do any work on the RattyT, So it was time to do some geek work. I have a ESXi 3/5 server running on my old workstation. To my surprise the install of ESXi 3.5 we smooth. I was expecting it to have issues with my hardware. But it installed first time.

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard with 4GB Ram
2 SATA 120GB drives not in RAID
IDE DVD Player
IDE DVD Recorder



So that got me up and running very fast. The server has two SATA drives so one was the install and the other is now data.

Its working really well, I have a Win7 & SSLVpn server currently running on it. But I wanted to try the newer version. ESXi 4.

Now to administer ESXi there is no MAC VI Client, So I have to run a windows client (Win7) in fusion on my mac to be able to install the VIClient and administer the ESX server. So I wanted to try the upgrade in place option using the VMware Host update utility.

Once I finally got in extracted from the upgrade zip file and installed on my Win7 admin vm, I struck this issue when trying to access the ESXi server. I was presented with this error.

“The type initializer for ‘VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy’ threw an exception.”
Of course it was since I am using Win7, ..... sigh

So after some hunting I found this great article, This got the vSphere Client running,

http://www.techhead.co.uk/running-vmware-vsphere-client-on-windows-7

But then when I tried to run the Upgrade utility if failed the same way. ...
More digging, another great article

http://folgaizer.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/how-to-run-vsphere-host-update-utility-on-windows-7-x64/

So go both the clients running on Win7.

Next I tried to do the upgrade .... While going through the upgrade I got half way and got this error

"Boot disk layout not supported"

I wasnt able to find a work around for this one, it was 1:30am I needed to go to bed.
So I am planning to recreate a USB boot fob running ESXi 4, This will have two benefits. Easy upgrade options and since its only a home server more things to play and learn from. But the biggest advantage is that I will free up my other 120GB hard drive for data and VMs.

Cool Clip

Body work part 11 : Front sub-frame

With the front lower cross member inplace I can now make the first steering column mount. I clamped the column inplace to make sure that it was going to be the right height and worked out the angel and lenght that I needed for the mount plate

The mounting plate with the holes drilled and trimmed, ready for a couple of tac welds.

After doing a few checks and doing the finishing welding and grinding back the plate is in place.

To add extra strength to the plate I added a top tab, this will eliminate and chance of the plate twisting forward or down.

I found some bolts that allowed me to do a temporary test fit, I need to get the proper diameter bolts. But the fit was good and after getting in and trying it, it was just as I had planned, always a good thing :)

With the light fading I only and time to weld in the lower cross member that will hold the bottom steering mount bracket.

All done for the evening

Just Cool

Body Part 10 : Front sub-frame

With the body on the chassis with the new floor and everything else on the body 80% done I could focus on the steel sub-frames that I needed to mount the steering, instruments, wiring.

So the first thing I did was alter the from sub-frame I had started, I narrowed it so that the tabs can be able to drilled and mount through the new sub-frames that I have added underneath the car.

New front sub-frame with the tab to mount through the floor to the chassis.

Once that was weld and tided up, Welding is still a little hit and miss. I clamped it to the front sub-frame, First to make sure I could get it out if I welded them together.

It came out easy, so the next step was to get it all in the right place in the car and tac weld it in place.

Trial fit using clamps.

The front and back sub-frames clamped in place with the cross members ready for a few tac welds to hold it in place.

Out of the rattyT ready to do the finishing welds.

All done, well welded, I will be trimming the cross members back and tiding up all the welds.

Over all pretty happy with the weekends progress.

It was hard to get motivated, but once I got out there and started to chip away at it I made some good progress.

Body Work part 9

So after getting the brakes 90% sorted, I worked on the steering and the angel I wanted to have it to make it comfortable to drive.
So with some string holding the steering in place I think i got it just right.

Brakes part 2

Work on the passenger side brake line.

Molly grabbed the camera, so hes me happy in my work.

Its my "Straight out of bed into old clothes start work on the car" hairdo

Both front brakes lines complete,

Rear brake line done.

I just now need to trim and put the connectors on the tube abd fast to the master cylinder.

Brakes part 1

So the next step is to plumb the new brake lines, Since they were on the bottom of the chassis rails they needed to be moved.

First task was to remove the headers, this made for easier access to the chassis for putting in the self tappers.

Duck taped over the exhaust ports so that no dust or dirt can get in there while I'm working on it.

Next I double flared the end of the bundy tubing and then started the process if bending  the tube to route around the suspension  and where the steering box goes.

The brake tube runs under the steering box, theres plenty of clearance and makes for a tidy routing of the tubing.

Next night I worked on getting the tubing secure with the clips and self tappers.

The shots a bit fuzzy, i was trying to show the clearance under the steering box.

Burning the midnight oil, working on the passenger side lines, Removing headers.

Body work part 8

So after a number of trial fits I glued and screwed that bottom plate to the floor. I used the supeDupa sticky liquid nails and then clamped and screwed the plate in place.

Starting to add glue to the floor and the bottom plate, the below shot shows me 1/3 of the way through glueing up the plate.

After the plate was glued on I then clean up the welds on the chassis.

After a few days to sure I trimmed the bottom plate back to match the floor.

After doing another trial fit, either the body has warped in the glueing process or the chassis is slightly twisted, as the body dosent sit completely flat, there is about 4m gap on the front right corner. I will have to investigate where the problem is.