With the snorkels mocked up, I worked on cutting out the holes in the air cleaner body to receive the snorkles....
OK, let me back up a bit! Lots went on here! As you can see in the picture above, I now have clearance at the front of the air cleaner lid, note the slight amount of light peeking up at the front, and the gap below the engine cover at the rear. This didn't happen automagically!
I have an Edelbrock RPM intake installed. I may not have had to do all of this, had I gone with the regular Performer model, but I probably would have had to carve more on my jackshaft center bearing support area, to clear the automatic choke unloader....
I also had a 7/16" carb spacer installed to make everything fit...but, as such, the front of the aircleaner cleared fine, AND the rear was too high! Just removing the spacer was not the answer....see note about choke unloader above!
I purchased a couple of 3/8" flat spacers and determined that I needed a "wedge" spacer cut....
In the rear, is my first WAG at a proper angle...this one was cut at aprox 3.3degrees. After test fitting, this dropped the rear of the air cleaner just fine, but raised the front of the aircleaner! (Notches cut in the one edge are for auto choke linkage clearance on the primary throttle shaft area.
My dad is a machinist, and was helping me out with this.... After he mentioned trigonometry and stuff like "X" number of inches drop per linear inch....I had to get my calculator out and my trig tables....boy, this was scratching for some old brain cells to wake up! After a good deal of dimensional drawing, accounting for front and rear height changes, I determined that a 1 degree spacer wedge is what I wanted. See wedge in the front! This is what allowed the air cleaner to fit properly!
I also picked up some self centering washers, to account for the fact that now my carb is sitting off angle from the holes that the studs are mounted!!!! These special washers have one side that is convex, the other concave. Sweet!!!!
A slight amount of carving on the center bearing area of the jackshaft carrier, and I was back in business!!!! Back to air cleaner!
I welded up the hole where the original air inlet was on this version
Welding on 22 gauge tin is an art! If I had smaller tips for my gas welder, I would have used it, but all I had was my wire feed mig welder....so easy does it! Got a few burn thrus......
My next big job was to spot weld the top ring that I cut off, back on to the top of the air cleaner body. I first tried this with 1/8" holes and the mig welder.....all I did was fill the holes on the inner ring piece and simply mis-color the paint on the outer layer of the body I was trying to attach to! (I did clean off the paint on all sides.....)
Here is a shot of a missed "spot" weld...note the air...
Needless to say, when I got done, I had only one half of a single attempt that stuck...and it popped off! That was out of about 16 weld attempts! ugh!
Was going to borrow a buddies' stand mounted spot welder, but got to his shop, and not only did he not have the proper 220V plug on the cord....but he had no 220 in this part of the shop yet!!!!
Off to Harbor Freight..... spot welders were on sale...so picked up a 220V version.
After trying to translate the poorly translated instructions....were they Chinlish or Englise?)and all of the scrap tin in my garage, I came up with about 3 or 4 good spot welds out of many!
I popped over to the Miller Welding website, and THANKFULLY, they had a PDF version of the instructions for their similar spot welder. MUCH better instructions, but they still left a hole or two to fill...(welding humor there...!)!
I stopped by my buddies shop and used his shear to cut me a boatload of 1/2" to 5/8" wide strips to practice further with...
After adjusting the tongs and pressure accordingly, I was now able to get what I thought were some nice looking spot welds, that actually seemed to be holding!
First attempt at the top, second at the bottom.
Tried this a lot! ...to be sure I was gonna succeed....or do better anyway!
Continued, next post.