I've been busy trying to get the shop organized, which I think is a never ending job. But, I did get it cleaned out, straightened up and had room enough to get my old project from many, many moons ago moved from my old shop to the new shop. That is to say, I got the Suburbillac, a 1949 Chevy Suburban that I grafted a front & rear clip from a 1970 Cadillac with a 500 cubic inch motor, moved into the shop. The old suburban had been crunched in the left front and I didn't have another fender to replace it so I used fenders, hood and grill from an old 1954 Chevy PU. So now I guess you would say it is a 4954 Suburbillac, or at least that's what I'll call it. The picture above on the blog template is a 1954 Suburban that one rodder had built. I thought he did really nice job and it kind of gave me an idea of how we'd like ours to turn out.
So, now I'm presently working on the New Mexi-Can, the Suburbillac, and sort of gathering stuff for the 41 Chevy COE build. I think I have most of the stuff (or at least the big major pieces) that I'll need for the COE build, but I still have time to change my mind or change directions.
It took me nearly a whole week to get the shop cleaned up, rearranged and organized so I could work. It still isn't the best but it's a whole lot better than it was. Everything that was in the middle got put up and stashed somewhere out of the way, so I got the middle cleaned out. That allows me to have the suburbillac in the middle of the shop and I can still park my pickup and Patsi can park her car, or we can leave my PU out and move the New Mexi-Can inside or start on the COE. For right now we'll just keep parking the PU in the shop.
Above you can see the old suburban project. Yep, there's still a lot of work to do. Yep, I enjoy it. When I get tired or bored working on a project I have plenty others to interest me and take up my time. The 1954 grill (the two toned primer job) was smashed in pretty good on the middle nose piece. I had to hammer it out and re work it. I'm sure it could have been done more professionally, but with my limited knowledge of body work, I think it turned out OK.
Ok, you body working professionals out there don't give me a hard time with my technique. This doesn't look very pretty right now, but it did turn out pretty good for an amateur (check out the 1st 2 pics). I wish I could have found my camera earlier and taken pics before I started, because the nose was totally smashed in about 2". I got it hammered out and pretty much the basic original shape. I had a tube of body filler that I used first and later found that the body putty that you mix is much easier to work with.
I've still got plenty of body work to do. The passenger side fender needs some work for some owees that it got somewhere along the line. And the back doors (as pictured below) will need some major attention.
Also widening the rear fenders about 3". Was going to use 71 Caddy tail lights, but haven't made up my mind if I really like those.
The passenger side door has the most damage of the two doors. But they both have a fairly big dent where they either backed into something or was rear ended by some driver not paying attention to what they were doing. From the looks of the damage I would guess they backed into something since it didn't really crunch the whole rear end.
Besides working on the shop reorganization, the suburbillac, I also taped out the New Mexi-Can dimensions onto the shop floor so I could play around with floor plan scenarios.
Here I have the bed , shower (on the left), and toilet (on the right) laid out with the bed in the rear and the bathroom/shower over the axles. Originally the bathroom was in the rear. Some of the purist will give me a hard time about not going back with original, but we're rebuilding this to use, for us and we want it functional and useful for us. So, it won't be going back to original condition.
Counter with sink (left top), stove (top right) and storage/closet (lower left), and frig (lower right) is over and forward of the front tire of the dual axles.
Nice shot of the toe of my boot. LOL
This is the front of the trailer where the sofa/fold out bed will be. Not sure if we'll use a fold out bed or not but it's an idea we can work with. We might just go with a built in sofa with some storage drawers underneath.
The above two shots are different views from the front of the trailer. We think this layout will work best for us.
That's about it as far as an update goes. I've still got plenty of work to do and often wonder if I'll ever get through with it all? But, as they say, the journey is the fun part, not the destination. So in the meanwhile I'm enjoying the journey. It keeps me busy, with things I like to dream about, work on and generally have a good time.
Gotta go for now, crawl back into my den and see what I can get done today.
Sooo, until next time............
Have a great day.
Overthehump
