Excellent use of tools – getting the tub off the chassis

for all your diy surgery needs

So, before the chassis could go to Cornering Force, I needed to get the tub off the car. The tub was riveted in place, and also sat on a thin bed of mastic. If you’re not familiar with this stuff, it comes in tubes and sets like soft plastic. Like a more permanent version of blu-tac. But black. And more Solid. In fact, it makes me start sentences with conjunctions.

Sorry, back to the build. To get the tub off the chassis rails, i needed to drill out the rivets and cut through the mastic. Drilling, no problem, but getting through the mastic… difficult.

I tried a few tools:

  • A Stanley knife wouldn’t cut through
  • A hacksaw didn’t have access
  • A hacksaw blade alone was too difficult to handle, and wouldn’t get through easily
  •  My ( … drum roll … ) 10k RPM air-saw did. It scares the willies out of me to be honest, being a gentleman who’s already had one too many digit reducing incidents.

The execution was simple – get it in the gap and move it slowly along. Result – all the mastic nicely cut through.

sage words

So, just before xmas, I introduced my long-suffering wife (H) to the notion of blogging the strip-down and rebuild, and the fact that I was going to accompany it with a video-diary.

Her rapid-fire response was:

Ahhh great – another way for the build to take longer, in all the time you don’t have.

I’m happy with that.