Of Shocks and Batteries

The Ckuckster brought over his little speed demon over to do some welding on the shock towers. He’s converting from torsion bar to coil over, which means the shock mount will be supporting the weight of the car, which it wasn’t originally designed for. For a little peace of mind he decided to complete the welding on the seams of the mount.  A little clean up and he went to town with the welder. Scat slid by just as we were starting and laid down some metal also. No fabrication needed, so it wasn’t anything too difficult.

So, was that not a challenge? Here’s one I decided to take on finally. The battery relocation on the race FX. Scat and I had fabricated a box out of heavy PC case quite a while back. Over the past week I had bought the rest of the parts necessary for this relocation so decided to finally get this done. My plan was to relocate the battery into the spare tire well in the rear. NOT strapped into a thin torn plastic box screwed into the subwoofer board that one of the previous FX’s had. That was a hack job, along with the two pieces of 4 gauge wire screwed together & wrapped up in electrical tape. It would definitely not pass muster for rally!

My intention is to tuck and inset into a corner of the spare tire well. There should be just enough space for the compact spare, I’ll need to relocate the hold down for the spare. The scissors jack mount will also need to be relocated, I think there will be space for that too, hopefully. But to do this will need to cut a hole to set the box down into it. I wanted to do this to retain a close to stock rear hatch cargo area. As a bonus it’ll keep the weight of the battery lower, which is the whole point of relocating a battery to the rear, for better weight distribution.

Drilled out the jack mount and made intial cuts with the demolition saw, there’s no going back now! Cut cut cut! Got a nice big hole now! Chuck goes to town with the hammer & vice-grips and we get the hole sized to fit the box in. The edges that I’d planned for flanges on the box to mount to are not flat so it looks like the box is going to need some further modification. Ckucky’s got other commitments & takes off & I break for dinner.

When I get back to it, I cut into the flanges & rebend them to match the contours on the body better. It finally fits up pretty good. It’s getting on into the night so I just tack it in and run some beads onto the one clean edge. I guess all the practice is actually working, these look solid. This box ain’t going anywhere! I wrap it up for the night, it’s too late to run power tools so I can’t clean up the other edges. I’ll need to make up some patch pieces to fill some spots anyway. Stay tuned!