rear clip, frame and repairs

The first picture is of the frame painted with the epoxy primer. The second and third pictures are of a frame dent-puller apparatus that I made. I would tack weld a bolt to the bottom of the frame rail and then put a stiff piece of steel box tubing over the bolt with a piece of wood at each end and then thread a nut over the bolt and tighten it down. If I put just the right amount of tack weld onto the bolt, the bolt would break loose just when the dent pulled out. I would then carefully grind the old tack weld off of the frame. Initially, the bottom of my Healey frame had more waves then the ocean from the ham-fisted POs jacking up the car, but when I was done it looked pretty straight. You can see the swiss-cheese outrigger in the picture. These all got replaced.

The next pictures are of the frame after it got media-blasted. I painted it with a PPG self-etching expoxy primer after that. The frame is now in my newly moved into, old body shop in late 2002. In the second picture, I was trying to adust my new welder and the ugly weld on the front was ground off and redone cleanly. There was not actually a weld on that spot. I figure that when my chassis was being built, the guy who was welding the chassis went out to lunch, had a few pints, came back to work tanked and forgot where he had left off. I suppose that this hypothesis is as good as any.

The next picture is of a wheel truing jig that was inspired by Jack Daniels and constructed with a wire-welder and an angle grinder. I have taken it upon myself to asign it a BMC Service Tool Number of 18G6787K.
The other picture shows the rear clip in complete disorder.
The other pictures are of the frame mounted on saw horses, which I kept making beefier and beefier to hold the rapidly accumulating weight of parts. Aside from the outriggers, pretty much only the tops of the frame rails were rusty. I cut the tops off, inserted lots of extra steel and welded inside and replaced the tops with heavier gauge steel.

The 26-foot long truck full of Healey parts mingles with my domestic crap that I moved from Iowa City to Wissonsin. Karl looks somewhat behildered at all of the rusty Healey parts.