You too huh?

Small world man. In 2006 I graduated from UMR (while it was still called UMR) with a bachelor's degree in Mining Engineering with an emphasis in Explosives Engineering. It was a great school then.

I started my business and learned to operate my machine tools while I was going to school. Needed some way to pay for things, and keep myself in cheeseburgers. :D

Well, the plan is to get the chassis built (fabricated tube chassis, with a cage, eventually), hang the body to get the stance right, then chop the top and get that all roughed back together, then build the cage to fit the body, pull the body and finish weld the chassis and cage, then mount the body again, slick up the chop, and repair all the rust and "wear and tear" damage from years of abuse.

The fender arches and the leading edges on the front fenders and the trailing edge on the rear fenders are the worst. Lots of fatigue cracks, tears, and general damage to those four pieces. The rear pan is semi-crushed from a rear end collision, not too bad, but it bent the frame a bit and pushed a crease into the bottom of the rear pan on the passenger side. That one's going to be a bitch to get out without tearing something up, but I'm gonna try it.

When I get that all done, I want to look at pushing the front of the front fenders out and rolling the grille shell out at the bottom, to give it a very slight rearward rake when looking at it from the side.

The plan is to run it without the big bumpers (Front or Rear), so I've gotta get the leading and trailing edges into an eye pleasing shape. That one is going to be a seat of the pants kind of deal, that I can't really plan anything for until I've got the front sheetmetal back together and the car down on the ground at ride height. Have to play it by ear, I guess.

Thank you. PM's are quite welcome, but I don't want to derail the topic here with a lot of gunsmithing advice out on the public boards. I will render whatever assistance I can through PM though, absolutely.

The only thing I didn't have to weld on that Essex were the frame rails, because the .22LR conversion doesn't really use them, certainly not like a real 1911 slide does.

On that double stack commander, I had to weld the rails on both side to tighten the fit side to side. Up and down, the thing had plenty of meat to fit it tight to the slide, but the frame was a few thou too narrow to tighten up the fit side to side, so I laid a short bead fore and aft on both side rails and refit them to tighten that up. Worked like a champ.

Welding on high dollar parts like that is a little stressful, but sometimes you don't have a choice. When a guy is paying two or three grand for a pistol, he expects the gaps to be perfect, and rightly so. In a perfect world, the parts would all be oversize enough to accomplish this without involving the TIG machine, but as we all know, reality diverges from perfection a good bit of the time. ;)

It wasn't all originally written as HUGE single posts. When I first started documenting the build it was over on the MetalMeet.com site and it was in much smaller posts. When we left Metalmeet and started AllMetalShaping, I copied the build content, merged, cleaned up some of the responses, and consolidated it as you see it. Most of the activity in those long single posts actually took place over quite a period of time.

Ahhhhh, that makes more sense. Just looking at it, it's like you had kept a diary on paper and then came back every so often to put a month or a week's worth of updates in the thread.

However it got there, it's an awesome documentation of the build, and I thank you for taking the time to put it together. I know how much time it takes just to organize and type up such a thread (of course, mine haven't been that long or involved, but I understand the effort that has to be put forth).

Thanks much for getting this place up and running.

I lurked on Metal Meet for a year or so, and I found it to be so disjointed and hard to follow that I pretty much gave up on it. I just can't stand those old threaded type forums where the text just marches off the right edge of the page, and the replies all layer on top of one another in such a way that it's impossible to maintain focus on the topic of the original post.

The VB format is much better.