Frame Table Project

[notchman]

Once the body is mounted, it's time to put the table in place, remove the wheels and level it up...here are those steps.

Step one, put the jack in place. When I fabbed the table I made the length of the jack support high enough to clear the jack with the table all the way down. Unfortunatley, with the table on the wheels, it's too high for my jack. So a piece of 4x4 will do the trick.

[notchman]

Step two, jack up the table and let the wheels fall out.

[notchman]

Step three, install the leveling bolts.

[notchman]

Step four, let the table down and remove the jack.

[notchman]

Step five, level the table by adjusting the bolts in or out. I misjudged the pitch of the garage floor from front to rear. I had to remove the jam nuts on the rear levelers and then bottomed them out. I almost had to go and get longer bolts for the front to compensate. But it worked out.

I leveled it front to rear first, then side to side and then front to rear again. It's now in place and perfectly level.

Once the table was level, I adjusted the middle leg bolts to touch the ground. These middle legs are only to compensate for possible frame table deflection.

[notchman]

Here's a look at the body and table as viewing from the rear of the car loking forward. Notice that I installed 1x1 tubing in between the body mounts to keep the car from tipping sideways and ripping up the heater channels. It is very solid this way. The criss-cross tubes you see are only temporary.

[notchman]

Here's a view from the front.

[notchman]

If my heater channels were not in very good shape, I probably would not have done it this way. However, it is very solid and I feel good about the progress so far.

Next step is to mock up the front suspension pieces to make sure that the chosen ride height will indeed work. Once this is verified, I can measure up for the rear clip and get it started. And also start building the main frame rails, etc.

[70fastback]

Looking great!!! lets see some steel in there!!!

[V8 Super Beetle]

Yup, looks bad a$$! Very pro.

[notchman]

Here's a picture of the rotor mount I made to hold the front rotors in place during mockup. Once the ride height was known (the actual height of the tires and rims I chose) then all there was left to do was to figure the center and the track width. I temporarily clamped them to the table while measuring and adjusting. Once they were in the correct location, I welded the supports to the frame table. By the way, I mounted them as close as possible to have no toe in or camber. And I allowed a 1/4" for tire squish.

[70fastback]

Any progress man? Looking forward to your build and motivation for mine!

[notchman]

Dec 7, 2010 2:22:46 GMT -5 70fastback said:

Any progress man? Looking forward to your build and motivation for mine!

I put an update in the member's rides thread.

[notchman]

Here's a nice pic of how I'm mocking up the front suspension using the frame table for reference. The crossmember is mounted at ride height, based on the lower control arms being level with the rotors mounted at ride height. I used 1x1's to temporarily mount the crossmember to the frame table. It is in place, centered on the spindles and level both ways. Now I need to buy the rear suspension clip, mount it to the table square to the IFS, then I can build the frame rails in between the two. Simple huh?

[V8 Super Beetle]

Very nice. Looking good.