Progress!

After months of not really making any progress on the Jetta, I finally got some stuff done tonight!  I've been really struggling with my hydraulic plumbing, these are really difficult lines to get right and I didn't want to waste material with mistakes.

I rounded up a bunch of scrap steel and stainless tubing, and bent each section individually.  Once I got the distances and angles correct, I tack welded it together.

The template:

After I had the mockup piece done, I transferred all of my dimensions to the real piece of tubing.  Then I grew a set of nuts and bent the fucking thing after 2 months of hesitation.  Nailed it!

I struggled to make clean flares on one section of tubing, and it ended up being some sort of inclusion or flaw in the tubing.  I had to cut 8" off of the end of the tube before I was able to get a clean flare.  Thanks a lot Shanghai Crystal Palace Pipe Co., Ltd.  This is seamless annealed 304 stainless steel tubing.

In random shop news, they're building a hunting blind!  We don't take half-measures at the shop.

I went on a Craigslist adventure this weekend with my friend Jimmy, he found an old Snap-on KR1000B toolbox for sale.  

This thing is enormous and really heavy, so we didn't trust ourselves to roll it down the ramp.  We rigged up some ratchet straps and let it down easy.

It's a huge upgrade over his previous Harbor Freight 44" toolbox!  The Snap-on is 29" deep, 54" wide, and almost 48" tall compared to the 18" deep Harbor Freight.  The whole HF toolbox fits into 4 drawers!

I got some new tools for myself as well!  The guy who sold the box was selling some of his other tools, so I snagged a set of hooks and picks for my work toolbox.

I ripped the old Ford to work twice in the last week!