everybody matt from eastwood one of the most common things you can do to a
custom car is to lower it or change the stance and old-school ways to drop the
body over the chassis or to channel it
in this video we're going to show you how to do a mild 3-inch channel in this
30 model a coupe that i recently picked up
let's show you what we're working with after we were done building our custom
chassis we had a place to set our body down on top of
since we'll be cutting some of the structure out of the center of the car
we started by putting a brace with flies in the body between the b-pillars we
started by cutting the entire floor out of the bottom of the car and leaving the
door sill and lengthwise braces intact cranked up the power and the Versa cut
60 and cleanly punched out the factory rivets holding the firewall braces
employees the entire floor removed we use the plasma cutter to cut out the
amount we wanted to channel the body down over the chassis on the firewall
we made sure the cuts were just a little bigger than the frame with so the
firewall could slip over the frame rails
now the floor was cut out of the bottom of the car we were able to test fit the
body on the chassis
yeah
next we rolled the rear axle with the wheels and tires we be using next to the
body and transferred marks to the rear inner fenders
just a little higher than the height of the axle tube we then use scrap metals
guides to run our torch against as we made the rear axle notches in the rear
inner fenders
we then bolted the rear axle in place and set the back half of the body down
over the axle
we next temporarily set the drive train into the frame to get a better idea of
loaded ride height
we then clearance the firewall to fit the drive train with the body back on
the frame
he stood back and check the side profile of the car and then we clearance the
front and rear notches to get the body height exactly how we wanted
all right now that we have the body sitting down over the chassis to hike to
be like ready to start on the subfloor
now the first thing I had done was I had two pieces of a thin steel been up to 90
degrees
they've run basically the length of the cabin of the car these pieces are going
to sit over the chassis like this
there may be modified slightly so that they sit against the rocker right where
we cut out the floor originally
after that we have these piece of you channel that are also made out of a thin
steel
they're going to run across the width of the chassis connecting everything
together like this after we do a few modifications we can weld all these
pieces together then we can drill some holes and said everything opposite the
body will bolt on just like factory
so let's get started because the body of a model a pinches in at the front and
the rear we needed to modify the side rails to match the same profile
we took small pie cuts out of the rails at a few spots around the a and
b-pillars allowed us to pull the side rails out to match the original inner
rocker area because we made pie cuts the gap of the cut was closed up as we bowed
the rails outward
we then clamp the rails in place and welded up each seam locking the shape
into the side rails the first side rail welded and the wells dressed you can
really see the shape we put into it next to an uncut peace when we originally had
the side rails bed up we have the top portion of the rail made a little wider
than we need it since we didn't know the final shape of the side rail until we
modified it with the side rails back in place
we marked out the excess material and trimmed it off with the plasma cutter
yeah
now we moved on to making our cross bracing for the subfloor because we've
dropped the body of the car down over the chassis r dr chef now sits higher
than the height of the floor in the rear
we cut a piece of schedule 80 pipe in half to make a quick loop for the center
of our rear brace
we then use the take 200 the weld the three pieces together
yeah
the rest of the cross braces were cut the length and we then work their way
towards the back of the car spacing each brace out evenly and welding them in
place
yeah
with the braces all welded in place we used many pinch weld clamps and C clamps
to pull the original rocker on the car against our new sub rails tightly
we then laid equally spaced stitch welds along the length of each side rail
connecting the body to our new subfloor bracing
and then fabricated some simple front braces that will connect the firewall to
the new subfloor next week lamp the braces in place and reuse the original
rivet holes to plug weld the braces to the firewall and Stitch well to them to
the subfloor
now the subfloor is pretty much complete
I drill pilot holes into the end of each cross brace and straight down into the
top of the frame rails
I wanted all of the hardware holding the body to the chassis to be great
so I started by locking a batch of nuts onto a carriage bolt and chucking it up
in the wave
I then machined off the hex portion of the nuts leaving me with round thready
great bungs that were just a hair bigger than half inch in diameter
and then drilled out the pilot holes in the chassis to half inch and countersunk
them to give us a value the layer weld puddling because the holes in the
chassis were just a little bit smaller than our threaded inserts were able to
easily seek them just below the conical area of the hole and set them straight
with a rubber mat Lee
yeah
with each of the threaded inserts in place I carefully welded them to the
chassis making sure the weld puddle state only on the edge of the answer
while also filling the bevel
yeah
now that the threaded inserts were welded flush
we were able to put the body back on the chassis and thread or mounting bolts
down through the cross braces securely fixing the body to the chassis
well the body bolted back down I think we nailed the profile of this car
now the materials we use to build this part of the project were pretty simple
and most of our time was spent and just getting everything to match the contour
the inside of the car now this isn't the only way that you can channel the
vehicle
we thought it was a pretty slick way that's really simple and gives almost an
oem look if we can use some of these ideas for your next project
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thanks for watching
yeah
ok
yeah