Hi,
You asked: What's the best way to get all the crud out of the inside of a
TR6 frame??
Well, you asked...
When I did the frame that I am working on right now, I had access to two
really great items that helped immeasrably...
A hoist capable of lifting a few hundred pounds, in my case, I had access to
a large machine shop and they had a 10 ton crane - electrically operated. It
was way kool, I spent at least an hour playing with it. In this case I was
able to stnad the frame fully on end because the shop had a cieling hieght
of probably 20 feet or more. It was way nice.
At any rate, you lift the frame up in the air and then tap it with a hammer
and blow air out every hole that you can find... flip it over - do the same
thing. Flip it upside down, do the same thing. Keep flipping it 'till
nothing else comes out.
If you don't have a hoist, you'll need at the very minimum some sort of help
to stand the frame up and to really go over every inch. Oh, and get someone
that knows metal working - you would not believe how many little cracks we
found in the welds that were there. We really went over things closely. The
frame is around 12 feet long, so you need a space where you have 12 feet of
headroom. Without that, you'd have to do this job outside.
Even after spending something like two hours on mine, I was not getting any
more rusty flakes out of there... I then went over it one more time. This
time I lifted it up pretty high and more of less "jounced" it up and down
and then I tried blowing it out again.
Turns out that there was still some crap in there. I found a little mouse
nest made out of some fiberous material, maybe some insulation or whatever.
Oh, if you find a mouse nest - make doubley sure the metal is not too thin
in that area. I've heard horror stories of frames cracking in half...
We then welded (TIG is awesome for this part) the cracks that we had found
and fixed a few "holes"... then we wire brushed it off (it had been
sandblasted previously and then stored in a nice dry garage, so there was
only a little surface rust on there. Then we painted it in a paint booth.
Total time - at least 20 hours with two guys working on it at the same time
- so about 40 man-hours.
The result is not concours, but it is very clean and I'm confident that
it'll survive some pretty serious AutoX for sure. Maybe some road racing (if
I win the mega-lottery or go out and get a "real job". ;-)
You might want to waxoyl inside the thing when you are done. I have not done
this yet on mine, but I will do it before I bolt the body on a bit later on.
That's about it.
Oh, if you have access to any tool that can measure the thickness of the
metal, you should def. do that. The gauge of metal in that frame is pretty
thin to start with. And after rusting it'll obviously be more thin!
If I had a larger budget, I would have loved to start with a new frame for
mine, but I didn't, so Ihad to make do with what I have.
Good luck,
rml
Bob Lang
TR6's including CC27777U undergoing a complete rebuild for RACING.
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