Good Art for Bad Eggs. Marc Nischan .com presents lowbrow art from the trenches of pop culture.
V-8 NIGHTMARE: Necessity is the Mother of Invention, and Desperation, too.
The week of the Dream Cruise, hotrodders from near and far come to celebrate the automobile and clog the roadways and bars of the Detroit metropolitan area. There are also about 600 thousand million rubberneckers, too. The whole area from 8 mile to Pontiac is gridlocked. The local tattoo parlor, Electric Superstiton hosts an event that's more of a locals only thing the week before. It's called The Broken Dream Cruise.
Anyway, I was staggering around the Broken Dream Cruise making friends, and I met this guy from the Poor Boys named Forrest. He has a really great '50 coupe, and we got to talking. Turns out I had a heater valve that he needed and couldn't find anywhere. I went home and got it for him. What can I say, Rolling Rock made a philanthropist out of me. Anyway, he does custom exhaust work. He said that my next move should be to figure out my steering, and then to give him a call. Flush with my first success at fabricating the tranny crossmember, I turned my sights to hooking up the steering.
The column was originally a one-piece metal chest impaler that attached to the steering box as one unit, and now had to be shortened and mounted to the firewall. So I made a template out of bristol board that went over the hole in the firewall, and then transferred it to sheet metal which I then cut out with a Sawsall as best I could. I finished it off with a grinder and a file, and later some runny paint. Rats. Then I stuck the steering column where I wanted it, and marked the end and cut it off. Next, I had to keyhole the column mount so the steering column could go through at an angle. This would have been a great time to have had a hole saw. Instead, I had to drill half inch holes inside the area I wanted to remove until there was a big hole, and use a round file to shape it. It sucked because the drill press kept snagging it and yanking it out of my hand or throwing it across the room or just spinning it like some kind of Rotary Death Blade. I welded the two together and moved on to fabricating a bearing mount for the steering rod to go through.
I went full-on hillbilly with this. I just greased a bearing up real good and tack welded it to a big washer, and welded that to the end of the column! Sure it'll go bad someday, but not all at once, and before that day comes I'll have a better column.
I blew some money on some real good Flaming River U joints, though. I get the feeling that steering is one area that you can't be too safe with. Brakes run a real close second.