The cumulative result of all the contact in the Lemons race in Altamont was that the front end of our car was in pretty bad shape. As you can see from the above picture, the left front corner is a couple of inches too high as well as an inch or two inboard of its regular position. Now a real race team would either replace the frame or send the car to a bodyshop for some frame repair. Unfortunately both those options would have put us well past the $500 limit for the race. This is where Robs forklift comes into the picture 🙂
We started out by cutting the metal bar that served as our impromptu bumper after the hearse took out our original bumper during the race.
Step 2 was to lower the left edge of the frame. For this we wedged the left frame mounting point of the bumper under a truck and then used the forklift to raise the rest of the car. It took a couple of attempts, and some interesting moments with the forklift on two wheels, but we eventually got the front end into a level position.
Frame Repair, Lemons style from rnair on Vimeo.
Step 3 was to attach chains each of the bumper mount points and use the forklift to widen the front end.
Body repair 2 from rnair on Vimeo.
As you can see we ended up moving the right edge over a bit so the final step was to push the right edge back in.
Body repair 3 from rnair on Vimeo.
In the end we were able to fix our front end for $0 and keep with in both the rules and the spirit of the 24 Hours of Lemons 😀
