I'd like to start this post with a story...
Once upon a time, in a garage not too far away from your very own, a little boy walked out into the garage. After the little boy looked around for a minute, he saw his father and asked, "Daddy, where do old trucks come from?" And his father replied, "Well son, when a daddy and a BFH love each other very much, they spend a lot of time together and eventually, a truck is born."
Ok, so I spent too much time using my BFH hammer today...I'll get to that in a min. But first...NEW TOYS!
In a "cheap" attempt to bend my bent crossmembers, I bought one of these nifty little kits.
The funny thing about that kit is even with the higher temp with the MAPP gas and O2 I still had to hold both that and a separate cylinder of propane on the metal to get it malleable enough to do much with.
The rear one before:
After:
As you can see, all I managed to do was get the top bend out, but the backwards bend towards the rear of the truck wasn't going to come out with just those little tanks. Oh well. So I popped the rivets off and took them out so I can take them to a friend's later and see if we can do anything with his toys. Oh, and to pop the rivets, I used my patented rivet-popping kit:
Yes, that's a railroad spike and yes, it worked beautifully! Here's what the things look like off the truck:
Pretty sad huh? I'm thinking the top one should be easy enough to bend back and patch. And I don't know if many of you can see this, but the very center of the lower cross member next to the scorch marks there's a rusted-through hole where the metal must have been weakened when it was originally violated by the PO.
More pictures of the related damage:
This is where the rivet actually ripped through the hole...
And more surprises!
One of the bumper brackets has a bit of an attitude problem too that BFH will have to correct later. The picture was actually taken after I got some of the bend out with the vice.
Then I took these off, wire brushed a lot more loose rust off the frame and called it a day.
The previously mentioned friend has also had powder coating done to his trailer and used POR-15 on his truck frame and says that he highly recommends POR-15 for my project just because it's easier to retouch and is more durable than powder coating. It will also save me $500!
Until next time [which will probably be me arguing with pulling the suspension and axle off]!