About 6 hours of prep work on the engine bay today.
Ahh the un-glamorous parts of the process; busting knuckles stripping seam sealer goo out of every crevice and pulling wire wheel splinters out of your hair at the end of the day
It’s a classic case of the inevitable rabbit hole – because I need to modify the bay for engine clearance anyways, while I’m in there with grinder/welder it’s the right time to strip the thing down entirely and stitch weld the whole thing. It’s the right choice, but makes this portion of the job about 5x longer to complete…
On a related note, when I got tired of cleaning goo out of seams, I tackled the engine bay mod necessary to fit the LFX. V8 swaps do this same mod to the rear corners, but they also require heavy changes to the transmission tunnel/firewall. For the LFX, you only need to cut the rear corners of the bay. (yay!)
These are the offending corners, dotted line shows where they need to be squared off:
First cuts were tentative, just to see what we’re dealing with behind there. The steering column passes through this area on the driver’s side so that had to be removed of course:
After more cutting. The below pics are almost there, but still more to take off the lower shelf. That shelf meets with a layer of sheet metal that comes up from below, so you don’t want to take it out entirely. You want to remove as much as possible without removing that sandwich – basically cut until you see the layers separating and then weld them back together. I’ve added the green lines to show approximately how much is left once you’ve cut it back enough:
I did some searching around for what others have done to weld up this area and bring strength back to compensate for what was removed, and frankly I haven’t liked anything I saw. A lot of methods, including what FM does in-house for V8 stuff is just a small bit of angled steel welded into the corner, with the rest of the exposed sheet metal edges just welded to whatever is nearby.
IMO, the full area where material was cut out should have plates welded in to transfer loads, as well as seal that area up as much as possible.
So, the plates:
Tacked into place, you can see how they tie each “loose end” where something was cut away back together:
After much welding…
Pay no mind to the un-stitched seams nearby, that’s coming next.