We want to make sure that the body has been cut away and any loose sheet metal has been grinded and re-welded.
Let me start this page with, there are about a million ways to do the body correctly. This is a personal preference thing. We wanted to cut the body back as far as we could. From the back side you can see we cut the fender wells all the up along the body line. Since we cut it so high we then had to run a weld along the seam where the fender well meets the body. When doing this, we had to use a very low heat on the welder so we would not blow holes in the thin sheet metal.
This is a decent side view of how high we cut it up.
After some grinding and sanding and a coat of undercoating you can't even see where we welded.
In the front we tried something a little different, where the flap is left over so you can connect the one piece front end. We welded in plates of metal to give it much better support. From the photo it is kind of hard to tell, so I put the red arrows. You can also see where we cut the front wheel wells out along the body lines.
We had to put a small plate in front of the stock steering shaft hole used to be.
The last thing we did was to cut out all the stock brackets behind the dash and fill in all the holes left behind. On the next pages to come, I will show you a cool wire cover we made out of aluminum. We also will install the fuel tank and the inside is ready to paint.
If you have any questions or comments about Chirco's Project Baja please e-mail don@chirco.com we sure would like to hear from you.
