Well I've got just a little bit more tweaking to do on the irons from these rockers that have
been through the wreck and I think we're going to be able to put this together.
You know, it's very common when somebody comes in the shop,
and I'm working on a coach like this and they have these rocker assemblies underneath,
their first thought is, oh you must be working on a sleigh!
I guess you all know better than that. We're going to put this rocker assembly together this week.
So I've got this rocker, this is the one that was on the right side that took the bulk of the blow.
I have it set down on a piece of heavy iron and this iron is four inches wide
and it's an inch thick, compared to our two and a half inch wide and about 3/8" thick,
so this gives me a stable base which to clamp this iron to. So you can see it has a bit of
a rock because this is out of alignment. So if I let it go to where the rear flat
portion sets down on this flat, you can see we kind of list to the right here. And if I
bring it down to where this one sits square, it actually lists to the left a little bit.
So I brought this square up, so hopefully I can show you. When I have this down on this end,
which is going to be the front of the coach, see we're about 3/8 of an inch away from that rocker
being square. And if I let it go to where the other end is, you can see I'm out of whack here,
down here at the base. So this whole thing is just not setting square. Somewhere I need to be in the
middle to get this to line up where it actually stands straight. So I think what I'm going to try
to do is I'll clamp this in solid. If I clamp that end solid it's going to want to pull the opposite
direction. And with both ends clamped, I'm going to see just where this is as far as square. It'll
actually kind of put these two ends in opposition to each other, but maybe it'll balance out,
and possibly I can just anneal it and find the happy medium. We'll see how it works.
So they're kind of fighting each other right now, but maybe that'll give us a
balance. I've probably got eight inch max, less than an eighth inch, so that actually does work
pretty well. So the thought would be, well if I just bolted this to the frame of the coach
body I would end up with the same effect, but it would be constantly under pressure,
under strain, so I'm going to take the torch and I'm going to heat up right in this area on both.
Now if I heat up this area first, and leave that one cold,
one's going to give, the other one's going to win. So somehow, how do I heat these both up at once?
But we're still leaning a bit to this direction, which is where this end wants to pull it this way,
so if I heat this end first, that end is going to overpower and allow it to pull into it which we
have that eighth of an inch. So if I monitor with my square, and heat this up until I come back to
that eighth of an inch, leave it there and then go back to that end, which this end is going to want
to pull it the other way, but possibly relieve the pressure there. And if I do that back and forth,
while monitoring my position here, I think I can get it to where they'll give and take
and end up with the main portion of this rocker straight where it's supposed to be.
Well it's not moved past my eight inch yet.
So about right there. I'll go to the other end and heat that end up.
So I'll check my measurements there.
So right there, we're awful close. We're 1/32 maybe. We're close enough. I'm going to let that
cool, both ends, take the clamps off, and then we'll just see if it stays right there. Well,
we're down to where we're just a little warm. We're just right there close,
so we'll see if it'll just stay there. See it move just a fuzz?
It wanted to pull that way just a bit.
It's still not flat.
Well I think I will re-clamp it and I'm going to increase the heat.
So we're very where we need to be there, so my guess is, I'm a little too concentrated on
my heat. I'm going to take a rosebud and heat this up a little more on both ends.
We'll see if it stays right there.
See if we gained anything here.
That was a problem first time, was just not enough heat to let this metal relax.
We're sitting pretty solid there. We should be good.
This is the second one. See how it lines out. It's actually pretty good right there.
I think since we set pretty flat I think we're going to leave that one as it is.
We're pretty decent. They actually line up pretty nice against each other,
pretty parallel through all this. Same plane, same plane, a little variation here.
I think we're just going to let this set. Next, our braces are going to get mounted up.
So these all have a hole that I need to drill for a bolt, and these also are countersunk.
Looks like they've been just stepped down with a couple different drill sizes. Maybe an inch, and
down to a three-quarter, looks like maybe a half inch bolt, so I'll try to simulate that and make a
set of bolts that'll go through here to hold our braces on.
So it seems like we should be ready to assemble
these rocker assemblies onto the main frame of the body of this coach.
Except when I had them set down here like I do, I noticed something about these braces
that go across the main frames of the floorboard here, that correlate with these rocker braces.
If you can kind of see this these, these are bent just with square bends. Well because this rocker
wood is sawn out on a curve, so that it settles down into the thorough braces, these lean in,
in relation to the curve. If I put a square up to the inside where this internal bend is,
I think you can see that this lays to the inside.
It doesn't set up square. And it's the same way with all four of these.
This one is about a quarter of an inch. it's a little less severe,
but still it needs to come forward. On the other side,
this one is much more extreme. This one is closer to a half inch leaning forward.
This one is similar. See they're all leaning to the inside because of the curvature on the
wood on this rocker. So what is happening is the top of these are all at an angle.
If I put this wood across here, see we're contacting here, but what a space we have here,
on the top of these irons because they're at a curve are laying down like this.
So when I put these onto the cross frames of this floorboard these aren't going to set correctly.
And this is the cross frame brace to the front. This is both on the left side. See we have contact
here, so they're they're both sitting at an angle. So, to get these flattened up to where
they sit correctly, I could bend this portion square to where it sets flat. But if I measure
from the center of this bolt to the center of this bolt, I should have right there at 33 inches. Well
if I measure from the center of this iron to the center of this iron, I only have 32 inches.
That's how much these are leaning in, again, because of the curvature. So what I need to do is,
I need to bend these braces right down here, on all four of these, to stand these back up to where
my spacings here are also at 33 inches to match the bolts on these rocker irons. And that will,
in turn, level these up to where they will sit correctly and bolt securely to the cross frames.
So I thought I was ready to assemble these onto the body, but I've got to take all
four of these off and straighten these out, right down here in this bend, to stand these up square.
And it's going to be much easier to do it now before I'm laying on my back underneath trying
to get these off and straightened up. I'll just pull these off and straighten them up.
Now it's possible I might be able to do this without heat. If I just stick these in the vise
back on my welding table. In order to stand this up I need to take this end and twist it
this direction, put this kind of a twist in it, to get this to stand up straight,
for this end to still be contacting the curve, but allowing this to square up. We'll see.
That's a lot to twist in that area without any heat. I may have to heat that up.
It appears to stand much straighter. I'll do the other side then we'll measure across and
see what we get. I had 32 before. See I'm at 32 and a half. If I stand this
other one up I'll have my 33", which will match the same as the attachment bolt.
That's going to make us the same measurements that we are at the mounting holes. I said 33:.
We're actually 32 and three quarters. And up here we're 32 and three quarters,
right there. So if I put our flat plane on there now,
now we're where we're supposed to be. We're actually going to set flat on both of these.
Well it kind of seems like it's been a long process to get to this point, but because of this
wreck and all the twisting and tweaking of this iron, it's just kind of the process that it took.
So I enjoy kind of showing you some of the things that I go through and straightening things out
that have been in a wreck like this. And I hope you find that it's been worthwhile as well.
So once again, we're making some headway. Thanks for watching!