Another build thread? Yep, my track-style T

[J. Robinson]

Thanks, Don. Yeah, progress is slow, but steady. We are in a crunch to get my son's car running for the Turkey Run and time is growing short...

Anyway, as long as I'm having fun I thought I would move to another visually rewarding project and fabricate the front bumper. I began this operation by making a special bending fixture. I took some scraps of 3/4" plywood and cut them into half-circles. The middle peice has a diameter equal to the spread of the front frame tubes/spring mounts on the car. I cut this piece carefully and worked it on a belt sander to get a nice smooth contour. The outer pieces are 1 1/2" larger. Since they are just guides for the tubing, the outside radius isn't as critical and I just left them "as cut". After all three pieces were cut, I glued and screwed them together in a sort of sandwich. The finished piece looks like half of a big pulley. Finally, I bent and drilled a piece of 1/8" x 3/4" flat stock to make a loop to hold the tubing at one end.

To use this apparatus, I just clamp it in a vise, insert a piece of tubing into the slot under the loop and bend the tubing around the form. After bending about halfway, I slid the tubing further into the form, clamped on a pair of vise-grips to keep it from sliding back, and bent it some more. I made two half-circles. I discovered that the tubing springs back some, so the bends ended up with a shallower radius than intended. To fix this problem I resorted back to my trusty hydraulic bender and deepened the center of each piece slightly.