No really, I’m doing stuff…

Body work takes a while. By “takes a while” I mean “seems like forever with grinding dust, sanding dust, welding blowing through unseen rust, cutting out pieces, globbing too much weld where there are holes, spray paint fumes, etc. I’m 100% sure there are better body folks, but I do ok.

On the Bronco project, there were some issues with the body but they were primarily in the engine bay or other unseen places. The other advantage of the Bronco project was that nearly all of the body parts were available to order replacements. That is not the case with the Gladiator.

I’ve already spent some time with doors and rockers. now it’s on to quarter panels, bed, etc. My healing bench is where things go to get fixed. Let’s get it it because I’ve got…

No excuses — Alice in Chains

The panels were a bit..

Footloose — Kenny Loggins

… so gonna have to pin them down.

For instance, in this image, the bumper hid some surprises.

Once I pulled the bumper off here is what I found:

So yeah, it needed some quality time at the healing bench.

This was taken when priming you can also see that some of the joints were bent a bit.

Before fixing it I did a pre-fit. Here are a few of the things I’ll be fixing:

I found 2 other splits in the sheet. Here’s the easiest fix.

On the bench! In this pic I’m fixing the top which was rusted through on the left and had some pinhole rust spots which I’ve ground, patched, welded.

here it is after grinding down the welds, sanding, and priming. The “front” is on the right. You can see it’s actually a bit crumpled too.

Here it is bent out, and welded together, then the welds ground off. I think it turned out pretty well. The shiny bits make taking a picture tough to have it make sense. I also have one after priming.

The inside of the fender also needed some tending to firm it up.

Here it is after priming.

The passenger side is going to need more time on the healing bench. I’m not sure how much of that wreck-of-a-repair I can fix.

so I got a clamp to get bits to at least mate up. Oof, still has some old bondo on it.

and this just ain’t right

bend-o-matic got engaged here apparently. or a wreck.

The healing begins:

Here it’s getting almost into shape..

Here you can see where the spot welds are pulling through… oof.

What I do is look for edges like this. It indicates something was bent. It may also get stretched as a consequence when you unbend it. Be careful.

Here you can see the front is coming together

After unbending welded up some holes

The top edge had some pinholes as well.

Not terrible after some grinds and paint!

The back of the quarter near the bottom of the front door is a whole ‘nother bad.

I chose to cut it out and reform the area. Even that was sketchy

Seam splitter helped

Used dollies and a body hammer and straighted/coped/worked on the curves.

Trying to get this to match the other side… it was crinkled so is tough to get it all shaped.

Here it is from the worst possible angle. there is supposed to be a step on the top where the rip is in the metal.

Here I began forming a new bit.

In go the bends:

Without a really good brake, here’s what’s what.

After bends and edge bends.

Finally! Clamp, weld, grind, prime…

It’s close. Needs some up-close corner grinding but that’s about it.

Three are still some places that body filler is going to be the right answer. I can’t get the angles right on that front area with raw sheet.

Front quarters done!

Pedals

When crafting a vehicle it’s easy to think that pedals will kind of be easy. it turns out that your feet want the pedals to be at about the same lift from the floor and they want the angles to be “sensible”. The last thing you want is to miss the brake pedal when you are in a hurry to find it!

Here’s some flower songs to go with petals….er…yeah

A kiss from a rose — Seal

Bed of Roses — Bon Jovi

Marigold — Nirvana

It ain’t all flowers — Sturgill Simpson

The buggy was relatively easy because there really wasn’t much space to start with so whatever I could do was the best it could be. For the Gladiator, we’ll see how it works out.

Here’s where we started… oof.

The gas pedal also wasn’t really attached, it was more kind of screwed to the floor.

For the ebrake I can use the original. Not much to change/do there at the moment. However… adapting the brake pedal and the drive-by-wire-throttle… that’s a different story.

First I found a good spot to mount the brake pedal inside that reused some of the space for the original brake master cylinder. Of course I’m using the more modern donor truck’s hydraulic booster and brake master cylinder. Here you can see those mounted to the firewall.

I also spent some time marking on the firewall where the controls will go through and starting to plug holes I won’t be using. Here is where the brake pedal landed. it’s pretty good out of the box!

Backing up a bit it looks pretty good I think with the ebrake position:

That leaves drive-by-wire-throttle, which will be more of a challenge. If I positioned it like the donor it would go somewhere like here:

That’s no good. The non-tilt steering borked that up. If I “just move it over, the pedal is going to be in the center of the vehicle…

Ignoring where the pedal is landing, let’s just find a spot for it to mount…

There was a spot just uphill of here that wasn’t terrible and it had a bolt in “just about the right spot…”

Well, if I disassemble the throttle pedal and reassemble, can I make it work?

Looking at the pedal above, can I recreate that on the original pedal? I like the original pedal as it is pretty classy!

The back is steel! I think I can recreate the “new” pedal’s structure on the bottom of the old Gladiator pedal.

I think the hardest part will be NOT melting the rubber.

I cut off the last bit that interacts with the spring and cut out some steel in the shape of the support, then drilled a few holes and tacked it on the back of the jeep pedal.

Next I mounted the base up onto the firewall using a bolt hole that was already there.

The astute may have noticed I cut the s-curve out of the pedal link and flipped it over the other way. What you might not can see is that I cut a wedge out of the big end to get a better angle.

I spent quite a bit of time fiddling with this. Here is kind of what I’m after… sort of.

You want the pedals roughly aligned with each other and oriented to where the “throw” for the pedals are in basically the same direction.

Here is a similar shot but with the final piece of the lever arm at it’s fully extended position. Looks not horrible, but it’s a little too far in.

https://www.smugmug.com/app/organize/Gladiator/Interior/i-WZq7XhQ

At full throttle the clearance appears good. I think if I add just a wee bit of angle iron it’ll work!

I am not planning to attach the pedal to the floor as it was before. I may end up trimming the bottom of the pedal. Here it is after tacking in the top of the angle iron. It has the spring in so it’s at the far extreme angle for the pedal. I can adjust that angle by adding just a hair or two of material on the end of the lever arm.

Looks good at full throttle! none of the arm/structure is hitting the floor. I will have carpet/etc so I think it’s good.

Pulled out, welded, primed and painted… now stored until it’s time to fully assemble!

Pedal to the metal!