1963 Us Navy Dj-3a

This. The 4x4 world runs on slotted holes and big washers.

 

Back to arts and crafts tonight.

Top piece rough cut to rough size with a hole for the shift tower and on for the transfercase shifters. Both transfercase levers are back in this picture:


Both levers forward. This give me a size idea for the boot:


To get the final shape, I traced around the bottom with a Sharpie. First side marked:


Both sides trimmed:


Cover for the tower marked up and cut out:


This will be the final look. It's a low enough polygon count that I have some hope of successfully reproducing it in metal:


I'll need to tweak the front left corner a bit for more throttle pedal clearance, but I'm liking it overall:

 

I like what you've come up with there. My plan for the transmission hump after my t18 swap is to use an upside-down dauntless oil pan. I think it would fit nicely and look less fabricated, like it's supposed to be there to anyone but a jeep enthusiast.

 

Sacrificing a Dauntless oil pan in 2024? Isn't that a sin or something?

That is a good idea though...might pull an oil pan from the junkyard to do mine, since my fabrication skills pretty much end at angles, and curves are beyond me.

 

That's a great idea!

 

JMO - using an oil pan seems kind of cheesy. You can build something like this with hand tools.

Back in the days when shop classes taught you something, I took a year of metal shop where we spent several weeks learning sheet metal fabrication. Fireball's poster board model brought back a lot of that. Great work BTW.

A good result requires an accurate model. I expect Fireball will weld the corners of his cover, and then grind them smooth. Realize you don't have to weld to complete something like this. You could add flanges to all the right-angle corners and rivet the cover together. Pop rivets would be ok, though maybe not the most attractive option. You could also build from steel, make flanges and solder it together. I suspect panel adhesive might be another option, but I don't know if it would hold up ... should, but no personal experience.

What tools would you need to do this? You could cut the parts out with hand shears or aircraft shears. A very fine blade in a jigsaw would also work. Some kind of brake would be especially helpful, especially if you need to flange your panels.

Been a long time since metal shop, and I would welcome comments even if critical of what I've written here.

 

Yeah... you should work in engineering and make overtime with this on weekends, that's an industrial laser on the far right

 

The Jeep factory floor plates for a T-18:



The floor on the driver's side has been rudely cut away to clear the transmission. The factory plate covers it, but the hex head screws are sheet metal screws that go into the remaining floor material. Far from fancy.

Pretty sure these were developed for the F134/T98 combo and are unchanged - except for the transfer case shifter hole - from then.

I know that a lot of work has gone into Fireballs's poster board model already. However, I would consider refining this model with a crease across the top that makes the big flat area slope to the rear. Like ...

 

Looks like a press brake to me. And the console says Cincinnati, which suggests it goes with the brake. The laser is the ventilation on the right? Cool.

 

It hits the transfercase if I slant it like that. Any angled section could only be the last three inches. As it is now with the high back, you should be able to pull the transfercase out of the Jeep without removing the floorboards. .....Well, if I remember to have add an access hole to remove the shifter pin and levers.

 

The laser is the hockey rink looking enclosure behind the dust tubes. Dust tubes are going to an adjacent dust filter from a deburring machine between the brake and laser.
I think we are at 7 lasers, 3 turret punches, 32 press brakes, 2 stamping presses, 2 cnc routers, laser welder, sheer, tube benders, etc.

Fwiw a .188" radius would match the tub and you can accomplish that with a hammer, angle iron, and 3/8" steel rod.

 

Timgr, thanks for sharing the stock t18 cover. I never realized it didn't have curves. I'm not about to go banging on a piece of steel for hours or buy an English wheel to make something graceful, but dont want the tunnel to stick out like a sore thumb. I agree that fireballs template looks really nicely done, better than that stock t18 cover if i may say so.

After seeing what the stock tunnel cover looks like, I'm reconsidering, however I respectfully disagree that the oil pan would look cheesy. On the contrary, when I hold it up next to the shift tower, it actually looks like it was made for it. I'll be sure to post up whatever I decide to do with it, and will be happy to hear your praise or critique. The beauty of Jeeps is we can change our mind and go whichever way we want to with our projects!

 

Might be worth a trip to the auto junkyard and just shop oil and transmission pans. Never know what may lurk there you had not thought of. At about 13 years old. My first jeep, an old beater cj2a, had a bad motor. Found a used F-134 from a jeep truck. Of course the carb stuck thru the hood. I found a automatic transmission pan from some old car that was about 18 inches square and sloped from 4 in down to 2 inches high. Made a perfect carb cover on my hood. Looked almost like a factory hood scoop, except for the drain plug. LOL. ,. Wish I still had that ol- Junker. It was nothing, but I loved it like nothing else.

 

We were out of town Friday and Saturday, but I had some time to work on the Jeep yesterday evening.

First item was trimming away some more redundant flooring, and swapping out the vent cap on the Dana 18 for a hose elbow to run to a remote vent under the hood:


Both axles are getting the same treatment. It turns out the SM420 doesn't have a vent as such. It just vents through the shift tower. The only solution for a remote vent would be sealing up the shifter pivot with some sort of rubber boot and drilling/tapping the case for a fitting. The shifter pivot is close to 3ft off the ground, so I think I'm going to leave it as is. I'm not planing on going through water that deep.

I pulled my cardboard tunnel apart and marked up some sheet metal:


I cut the pieces out with a cut-off wheel in the angle grinder:


Here I'm marking where to drill holes for nice radiused corners on the cut-outs:


Drilling with a 3/4" step bit:


All cut out and fold lines marked on the shift boot tower:


I decided to start with that tower. I don't have a brake, so I started bending it in the vice using a hammer:


That was proving difficult with the reverse fold, so I made a makeshift brake with some 3/8" stock on the welding table:




From there on out, I did the small folds on the welding table, and used a wood spacer so I could clamp it in the vice for the larger opposite fold:


I cut the wood to length so it wouldn't interfere with previously folded sides:




I hadn't really thought this out well and would do it differently if I did it again. For the bottom mounting surface to be flat, the folds all need to line up perfectly. My folds are no where near perfect. It would have been smarter to make a separate bottom mounting ring I welded to the upper box. That would have guaranteed flatness.

In my case, three sides came out great, but one was at a different level. I ended up having to beat the thing into submission to get a fairly flat surface on the bottom.

Sides clamped together for tack welding. You can see all the hammer marks, and a bit of an up-fold on the left edge to get it flat on the bottom:


Sides welded:


You can see the big gaps at the corners because of non-perfect fitting. It's another reason a one-piece ring at the bottom would have been smarter. In my case, I used a copper backing plate to fill the gaps with weld:


Gaps filled, ground, and corners rounded. It's covered in hammer marks and not for a show Jeep, but I'm pretty happy with it. Good enough for this Jeep:


The Tera-Lo gears showed up:


They are in the accumulating piles of parts for tasks on the Jeep I haven't gotten to yet. If I ever get this floor done, then it's exhaust, radiator, carb rebuild, dual circuit brakes, parking brake, and maybe it will run/drive decent. Then I can move on to more offroad specific stuff like Tera-Lo gears, front locker, cage tie-ins, winch, ...etc.

 

Regarding the transmission vent... use a cv boot for the shift tower and then you can drill and tap something for the vent tube.

Not soo much a stream crossing issue but to keep you clean if you flop and it takes some time to flip it back over.

 

Good progress tonight!

I started by cleaning up the to-be-welded areas on the sliver of original cover I'm keeping:


Then I got clever with my "brake" bending up the sides of the new tunnel:




I used some self tapping screws to hold things in place while fitting. These will get replaced with nutserts for the final install:




Initial fitting of the top plate:


It needed some trimming. Here it is marked:


Enough tack welds added in position in the Jeep so it will keep its shape on the welding bench:


I spent a good hour and a half making tack welds to join the sheet metal together. There were a few spots where the old metal was super thin and I had to chase some holes. Here it is part way done:


Here it is with all the main welds completed. I'll grind these welds a little before painting, but probably not completely. I'd rather have strength than beauty for this Jeep:




Weld penetration looks good:


Tomorrow I'll tackle the little missing triangles on the bottom rim of the new section. There are also several other little tricky areas I need to deal with.

There is a triangle at the front left corner I need to weld a piece into:


This long skinny hole where things didn't quite line up on the passenger side also needs a filler piece:


All that weld mess above it is one of the two places the old metal was incredibly thin and I had to fill an ever increasing hole. Definitely ugly!

The last little things that need to be dealt with are the two triangles here at the bottom back corners:


But all that fiddly stuff is tomorrow night. Before I headed to the house, I had to check to see if it still fits after all the welding, ...and it did! It takes a litle finesse to get the bolts in, and one need the hole slotted, but it does bolt back in. I'm pretty happy with it:


I have some Stronghold vinyl shift boots ordered that should close it out nicely:

 

Use TIG filler wire and feed it in while you’re MIG welding gaps like this in sheet metal. You can also lay it in flat inside gaps, weld the end then the other end and when it’s melting just bend it off to remove it. Feed more filler wire while MIG welding until filled. Use a flap disk on a grinder to blend.

I would also weld all those seams from the inside and blend the outside with a a flap disk.

this cover looks amazing. Fantastic work and I love this jeep.

 

This is looking great! You are making good progress. Looking forward to seeing the rest of your progress.

 

Welded in a bunch of small pieces of metal to fill up the holes:


I usually form one end of a bigger piece to fit, use the extra to hold it in place, and then cut it off after welding:


Others needed to be held in by magnets:


Not super pretty after the fact, but I have a grinder:


In fact, I went to town with the grinder and it turned out pretty decent. Everything came out great on the new metal, but the interface to the old metal isn't as good. But good enough:


I remembered to fill in the old transfercase shift lever pin access hole. I also needed to add a tab for a hold-down bolt to this side because I didn't leave enough overlap when I trimmed the Jeep floor. Oops:


Now it's back in the Jeep so I can drill hold-down bolt holes and put rivnuts in the floor:


It's ready for paint after that and I can tackle ftting the upper piece.

 

Looking pretty good!