I had a chance to splice together some video of the current progress of the BatBerry. I hope you enjoy it 🙂
My daughter and I had a ton of fun making the video (with some help from others) and she was having a blast working the smoke/fog machine. The neighbors were wondering what the heck was going on.
Another step forward today in getting the plumbing ready. With +6°C weather today I figured I would take advantage of an afternoon in the garage. Next week is supposed to be crazy cold 😦
My daughter and I headed over to the local Hot Rod shop this morning to pick up the transmission cooler seen at the top of this post. The original radiator on the caprice used to have a transmission cooler core built right into the radiator. But my new aftermarket radiator doesn’t have that feature. The transmission cooler I decided to go with is a heat-sync frame rail style. This is different than the tube and fin ones that would typically mount in front of your radiator. Since the space in front of my radiator is pretty tight, this style will do the trick.
I had posted earlier about doing some mock-ups for the fuel tank as well as using linear actuators to help lift and lower the hood in order to not mark up the car when using the winch. Well… the parts arrived.
First up was the fuel tank. Even though it wasn’t “exactly” as advertised. It does look like it will do the trick. There was a 45 degree filler neck that came with the tank that should work perfect. I just need to drill the tank and add a fuel return line as well as a filler vent with roll-over valve. I have the parts, I just need to get some bulk-head fittings and do the work.
I was able to take two weeks off of work to match the time my wife and daughter had off, and this last afternoon was spent in the garage. A good way to finish off the Christmas vacation 🙂
I spent a good solid 4 hours finishing off a bunch of various boxing and bracing tasks (after sewing two of my welding jacket buttons back on). First was the boxing of the driver’s side chassis tube into the front horn to match the work I did on the passenger side.
After a lovely trip to the dentist this morning, I was able to spend the afternoon finishing up some welding on the front end of the BatBerry. Tomorrow will be a fun Daddy/Daughter day going to the International Motorcycle Show! We really enjoy spending the time together sitting on the bikes, eating pizza and checking out all the cool custom bikes.
I finished off most of the mounting points for the radiator/condenser/fan cradle on Monday, but I had a few bottom connection points to finish up. I started off creating the drivers side mounting tab that bolts onto the old engine cross member.
I’ve made many posts in the past around how I might be able to make my fuel tank work. However they all ended up with me conceding to the fact that I won’t be able to make the fuel filler cap locations work for filling the tank. They were just sitting too low in order to get fuel from the cap to where my tank was sitting. This would create a P-trap in the filler neck making filling up at the gas station a long and next to impossible task. That means that I would have to pop the trunk each time I wanted to fill the tank 😦
An alternative was to try and get a custom tank built, but they were all pretty darn expensive. A couple days ago (after talking through the fuel tank situation with a friend) I figured I would give it another shot. The beginning of that conversation was around moving the air ride tank from its current position into where I currently have my fuel tank. This would allow me to place a fuel tank where the air tank currently is in order to make the fuel tank lower than the fuel caps.
Yesterday I spent the day closing out the year with a solid day’s work in the garage, and then with friends and family in the evening. It was a good day to be in the garage yesterday with outside temperatures getting up to 1°C. Wearing a couple extra layers made it actually quite nice.
I was hoping to get back out into the garage today to do the finishing bits before posting, but with the temperature going down to -7°C today, I figured I would keep warm and write up the progress from yesterday instead.
The first task was trying to organize the garage into a state where I could actually get some work done. It was full of the aftermath of a kitchen renovation and Christmas… yikes!
Building The BatBerry 