71 Wheeling Rig

Your experience with bedliner makes me question everything I have planned for my tub....

 

Can't say I'm a fan!

 

More bedliner removal today.

A scrapper, a heat gun, a hammer, a utility knife and a bunch of labor. Getting started:


Main floorboard done. It mosty came up by pulling the original paint off the metal:


You can see the crappy prep job they did when applying the bedliner. It doesn't look like they cleaned and painted the bare/rusty areas at all before spraying. They also sprayed the bedliner right over the Mortite where the floor pieces bolt together:


A few hours later, everything stripped of bedliner:


Did some parts prep with the cleaning disk on the grinder. Lots more of this to do before everything is ready for paint:


Decided to modify the overdrive linkage once again. This kink gives it a little more clearance to the body lip at the edge of the floorboard opening:


Marking and cutting the floorboard with the plasma cutter. It took about 6 trips to the welding bench and back to get it where I liked it:


Testing boots once I had the floor fitting well:


I have this spare and already modified transmission tunnel that came with the parts drivetain:


I don't feel bad cutting it up:


Starting to make a plan.......


Lots of cutting and welding strips of metal to come.

 

Bunch of floorboard sectioning tonight. It's getting there. There will be a little tower up to where the shifter boot ring is:


I stuck the upper floorboard in so I could hook up the gas pedal and make sure I could still operate it. The missing chunk here will be somewhat complicated:


It's not going to look amazing when it's done, but it will cover the hole and look good enough.

 

All the chunks of the transmission cover base are welded together. It's ugly because they only had super thin 22 gauge sheet metal at the hardware store and I'm not good at welding thicker sheet metal. Let alone this stuff. In a hurry to get this done I put too much heat into it and warped the only flat surface on the thing. Oh well, good enough for this Jeep for now. Note: the shifter holes don't have their final trim yet:


As you can see from the box in the background, the driveshafts are already here.

Here it is in the Jeep with the welds ground to look somewhat more presentable:


It looks like all the boots will fit. The only funny one is the overdrive boot needs to bend down at the back edge, but it looks like that will work fine:


Here's the other side. Hope to get the tower for the transmission shifter built tomorrow and be done with this thing.

 

Some paint will clean that right up. Nice work.

 

Bending up a lump to clear a bump on the transmission tower while keeping this tunnel as low as possible:


Lump attached and now shaping the hole:


I used some cardboard to make a template for the wrap-around piece. Here it's getting welded to the top of the tower:


More or less done. I have some triangles to fill at the lower front corners and some holes to fill:


Quite a bit bigger than the factory piece:


In the Jeep. It doesn't interfere with gas pedal access much. I still wanted the ability to put my foot on top the tunnel and use the gas pedal so I have a couple different positions for long trips:


And with boots sitting there. The ring for the transfercase boots should show up in the next couple of days and I'll bend it to fit:


All in all, It's turning out decent. If I had cut up a better condition tunnel and used thicker metal, it would be cosmetically better but this is good enough.

Tomorrow I'm leaving town for a couple days so there won't be any more progress until the weekend. I hope to get all the floorboards painted and ready so I can start hooking things up underneath.

 

What you need to do now is cover it up with some bed liner........

 

Oh hey, what a great idea!

 

Finally finished up the fab work on the floorboards tonight.

Cut a piece to fill in the old single lever shifter hole:


Welded it in place:


Makes me glad I don't do body work. I thought I had it perfectly flush, but nope. The edges of the welds also pull up from flat surface of the metal. After some grinding and pounding, this is good enough for a floor:


Drilling, drilling, drilling. Rivnut after Rivnut after Rivnut:


Test fitting everything with bolts/screws on the bench:


A final full test fitting in the Jeep to see if I'm done modifying stuff:




Everything bolts down as it should and feels solid. Now I can clean this stuff up and paint it.

Looking forward to mechanical work instead of this fussy sheet metal stuff. We'll see if I can get it running by the end of next weekend.

 

You should move the twin stick pivot pin hole while your at it.

 

I agree . somehow . I never got back to it . someday
as to shifter boot . with the long throws . that should last about a day
I use one like this . example
https://www.ebay.com/itm/164013614487?hash=item262ff92597:g:2QQAAOSwmFVeDA9a

 

Yeah, I thought about it.

 

I left mine alone. I use that hole to fill the T-18 through with a flexy funnel.

 

Isn’t the surrounding/remaining bedliner going to bother you?

 

Not until I need to change something out there.

 

Agreed. The main boot and the overdrive boots are sub-optimal. The one you posted looks decent. I was thinking about getting some black vinyl and make custom ones.

 

That came out good! You went in the same direction that I'm working with for my t18 swap, but I think you pulled it off a lot better than ever could. I'm definitely taking some of your ideas and incorporating them though!

 

got a TIG in house nice work

 

Bah, I forgot about one more piece of sheet metal work.

Some previous owner cut notches in the brake pedal hole, bent the left side back and cut it (I think so you can get the floorboard off without removing the pedal). When flattened back out, it looked like a cat:


So I welded in some "ears":


And reshaped the hole:


Hit all the rusty areas with a cleanup wheel and finger grinder where the wheel wouldn't reach:


And the first coat of paint is now drying:


I'm being lazy on the back side of the floorboards and only cleaning/painting the areas that had rust or bare metal. The goal is to protect and the dirty areas are already protected just fine: