A couple of things going on here.
This all started a few weeks back when we changed out the bad steering gear.
I noticed Barrett had done a tough job way back fabbing in this big Saginaw gear onto his custom frame.
Mind you, this was at least 7 years ago... maybe more. But when he did it, he kinda
hodged podged the back mounting bolt in place. He drilled out the steering gear box threaded hole and welded a nut up inside the frame. He flipped the mounting backwards on that one hole. Probably one of those "this will be fine until I can finish it up" things.
Well, when I put the new gear up in there to mount it in that back hole, the nut in the frame stripped out. After a heated discussion with me telling him he needed to get the mounting hole fixed correctly. And him telling me it would take weeks to do it right. And it wouldn't work right because of the angle. We stopped working on it. And I was punished because he said he won't work on my Daytona until he fixed this issue.
I went up the following day to look at things under less stressful times. And drilled a hole through the frame real close to the correct angle to the rear gear mount. He was upset with me, but eventually calmed down. I was trying to show him this would work out way better than the way he had it. Of course, it would require a lot of fabrication on his part.
So as of today... I went up there to put a Heli- Coil into the drilled out gear hole. He already has the new mount on the outside of the frame close to finished in this picture. He needed the threads put in the gear, so he can get the new bolt in it for the correct angle. This is the way it should be done. And it's almost there.
Another thing going on here in the picture... I always hated the way he had his front cover mounted. Well... it wasn't really mounted. He's using a lot of carriage bolts on mounting things on his Power Wagon to mimic the original rivets. This requires nuts underneath those bolts. That cover has a lot of things in the way underneath it. Pretty much impossible to get to those nuts. Most weren't even on the bolts. So I was on him to weld some captive nuts under the bolts. Another heated discussion ensued. We came to an agreement when we realized there was a lot of meat there where the frame was. So I rounded up some allen headed carriage bolts and tapped out the holes so we didn't have to access the impossible bottom of that cover. So you can see in the picture a 7/16" tap sticking in one of the holes. This will provide the needed access to what's under that cover in the future.
The suspect cover...
