TITANIUM firewall fabrication in 85 year old Willy's!

Hey I'm Troy and we wanted to give you a quick update on the 1939 Willys and working on the firewall. Here we go. So Cameron and I had been talking about trimming this back. You recall we had this section of the frame which included this section here. Well we decided since we're going to try and put zoomies and exhaust through here that we just trim this back and as it turns out this one piece probably I wouldn't doubt if that weighs nine pounds all by itself. So we eliminated that from the equation altogether. So what I did is that left I had to replace this strip, fabricate this strip which gave me a little bit of a break. In other words this is a straight edge all the way down then it turns and angles back a little bit. Well that worked out pretty well because I was able to make my template in such a way but I had to angle this back so that we had everything all to work just right. We transferred our design from the cardboard over to titanium, made our panels, speed rolled, required a break because again this plane is different than this plane. So had I come straight across I'd have a big gap here. So I have to do is put a little break across here and that brings it back up against my tube. Now we'll lay out our next panel and basically the way I'm looking at doing this is I'm probably going to run a panel from this corner over here and there and then one panel in the middle. That's a little bit of a different design than we normally do. Normally we close off each opening but because this is a unique situation and I have this lip going for me all the way around we decided trying to close off from this lip back to the cage wasn't going to look real good. So we decided to just go off this existing lip to around here. Now once the mid plate is bolted in this will be all closed off tight and you can see I stepped and rolled all of my panels where they overlap. That's going to make a nice tight fit when this is all bolted together. So I don't think I'm going to go CAD design on this panel. I'm just going to whip it up out of a piece of titanium. I have an outline of this edge and this angle and that's all I really need to lay out the next panel. So check with me in about 10 minutes and we'll see where we're at. While it is true I've been accused of waving a magic wand and getting this stuff done that really doesn't work in the real world. You actually have to make these panels at which point you just kind of get them to fit a little slapping them around a little massaging. The fact that I've been doing it since the middle of the last century helps but you got to start somewhere. So the hardest part of doing any of this is picturing it in your mind before you even start because once you kind of have a picture in your mind of what you want it's pretty easy to get there. It's just getting over that original the vision. Sometimes you can just grab a piece of cardboard which as soon as I get this in here I'll show you what I mean. You can kind of take a piece of cardboard and stick it in there kind of get a vision what you're trying to accomplish. For instance something to this effect you can see I kind of get this in there you can see it's a it's a little off and another thing is you'll see that this angle this way is different than this angle this way. So my overlap here I had to give just the slightest bit of a break back to be able to compensate for that. That way everything is nice and smooth. Now the reason I lay my panels this way is because in the event oil or what have you does spill on this it's going to more than likely stay to the outside of the car as it drips down as opposed to having this flipped around the other way or it could go in behind and go inside the car which isn't that big a deal unless it's on fire because at that point now you have fire inside the car and nothing ever good's coming of having fire inside the car. I've known this to be true for many years but basically yeah now we take our last panel and you will see that just a little bit the slightest break at the top across the top bead rolls and this should just kind of pop right in without a bunch of mumbo jumbo at all. Put a couple klecos in it. I know I promised I didn't drill all my holes in this one yet. I got interrupted for a video but I got a couple holes so we'll send that home. Basically that's a firewall in the 39 Willys 101. Of course it took a few minutes longer than what I showed here but the concept is still the same. You got to kind of envision what you're trying to accomplish and then set forth to make it happen. It's not impossible. It's not real difficult. It just takes some patience, a little determination. The right tools helps a lot but even without all the right tools you can still get it done and that's basically what we're looking at. It's all smooth. You can see all our seams, all our bead rolls. Everything's done pretty nicely. So what will be the next step for this trip? The next step I really want to start getting going on the tin in the back. We have a couple of issues that we have to take care of first. The biggest one being the steel decklid which is quite frankly it's like trying to hang on to a four foot piece of lasagna. I got to come up with some kind of way of bracing it to keep it from wanting to fold in half out from its own weight because the tubs are in it but I still have to do all the tin to close off the trunk area from the outside of the car. The firewall is pretty much handled. That includes the little pieces down underneath that I didn't show you how I fabricated those but it basically just closes this area off. There's a lot left on this car. At the same time it's getting near the end where we can start looking towards getting it all final welded and shipped out for coating but there's a rumor that there is a new style engine coming out I think come SEMA time but I think the owner wants to hold off for a minute and see if he can't get his hands on this new engine design so I'm not real sure how much we're gonna I'm gonna be working on this in the next month or two but I'd like to get it to the point where all we need to mess with is the engine but like I said with until we solve the problem with the rear decklid being as as flimsy as it is I'm not sure how much more we're going to do on this for a minute anyway so as for right now that's a firewall and like I said it's a lot different than what we normally do because it goes out to an existing firewall but I think it closes everything off pretty slick and if you come around to the other side you can look on the inside and you see all the tubing is inside the car now so it's similar in that it's a firewall but it's different because it's not only up against the tubing. I think this was the simplest solution rather than trying to close off all the way around the perimeter and then close in each hole like we normally do so that worked out pretty well plus to be honest with you we needed a little extra footwell space here so if I was to close this off on the front that would have taken up some of that space too so it actually worked out better anyway I think it came out pretty slick it turned out real smooth so I like it thanks for following along while we knocked out a little uh firewall action like always like share follow subscribe all that nonsense but most of all thanks for coming by checking us out and uh as always have a great day and we'll see you next time at CJ racecars