The weekend was truly packed with building goodness. Not only did I create an entirely new website for grabercars.com, but I also spent a massive amount of time out in the garage! Mucho progress = happiness!

One of the big changes to the website this week is the presentation of the image galleries. You are now able to rank and add comments to the images.

Click here to see this weeks image gallery.

During the past week I built up the front of the car to a rough shell. It turned out well. So well in fact, that I felt confident enough to move on to the rest of the ribs!

{mosregistered} Here I am testing the registered user display code. Doesn't appear to be working though... {/mosregistered} Wonder if any Mambosite CMS users can tell me why...

My first step was to cover the car in plastic sheeting. Sanding the drywall mud creates a fine white powder, like talcum, that flies everywhere and is difficult to sweep up, so I didn't want that on my seats.

I laid out 2x4 stringers on each side of the car and attached them to the frame with some drywall screws.

Then I attached the side fender arches that I had created some weeks ago. The top of the rear wheel arch is 23.5" above ground. The foam blocks under the arch piece show the bottom of the car at 6" ground clearance just in front of the rear wheels.

Everything was carefully measured, then re-measured, and measured again... I was afraid that if I didn't get these parts on properly now, then the body would not be square and much harder to fix later.

During any waking moments that I wans't working on the new website, building stilts for my kids, drinking heavily with friends or attaching ribs to the rear of the car, I worked on refining the coat of drywall mud at the front of the car. There are still some eggshell spots, but getting better and I think the next coat will be close. Then I can primer and sand.

 Next step was to create the center spine. This took even longer to attach and verify as I had to cut out around the engine. I think the hardest part was attempting to centerline a piece of lumber out in space. One thing I will make sure to do next time I build a chassis is to clearly mark a centerline datum. It's hard to take accurate measurements with all the components installed and I didn't want to trust the wheel locations, just in case the wheel alignment was off. (Which it was... by a LOT!)

You can see in this photo that I've already centered the spine and attached the first set of ribs. I wanted to start out over the wheel centerline because I know that is a fixed location that I want keep. 

Even though the car was designed in 3D and output onto paper to some degree of accuracy, In the end, a car body is more of a sculpture than a precise mathematical object like the chassis. Therefore the shape does not have to be, and probably will not be exactly to the shape I designed.

By the end of the weekend I had reached the point that you see in this photo. Not as much as I had hoped. But I had spent over 5 hours in the measuring and verification stages of installing the spine and stringers. Hopefully that effort will pay dividends in the long run.