new alternator bracket

I went to slide the frame back in that holds the headlights and hood on.  It hit the alternator.  I could have ground the frame down, but I didn't want to give up the strength and stiffness, and the alternator location also had a strike against it since its braked was against the hood insulation.  I decided to move it.  This let me go back to the short belt:

I laid out the hole locations using a transfer punch onto a notecard.

Then in steel:

Tabs for the alternator.  I wanted to make sure that the alternator was mounted really square so that the pulley and belt aren't fighting each other.  I tacked the tabs together so I could drill and grind them identical then cut the tacks off:

The original design used this insert so the tabs don't get bent into the alternator.  Since my tabs are really short and thick, I retained it:

Corner weld turned out nice:

I still prefer to mig nuts onto things.  I tape whatever thread sticks through during welding to avoid spatter making the bolt unremovable.

I did a quick FEA because I am worried about vibration.  The alternator is heavy and cantilevered, which will tend towards a low natural frequncy.  The belt will exert a high force on the bracket which will also drive the frequencies down.  Both the 1/rev of the engine, and the 1/rev of the alternator will be strong forcing functions, so consequently I wanted to take a look. I added the gussets you see which drove the first frequency up 50% to get away from the 1/rev for the engine. 1/ rev of the alternator will be hard to avoid.  The first mode is basically torsion of the post even though it is .095 wall. You can see I added a tab to share a bolt from the water pump.  This did surprisingly little to the first mode, but just seemed like a good move anyway.

exhaust over the axle part 1

So I have to make the exhaust go over the axle with enough clearance to allow the axle to go full bump with out hitting.  Also, the exhaust can't hit the floor, the upper control arm, the shocks, the shock cross bar, or the lower control arm bracket.  The mufflers can't be too low or at a weird pitch or yaw.

It is super close to all that stuff and it sounds hard, but the mustang exhaust was surprisingly close.  With a little cut, weld, repeat, I think I have good clearance on everything:

Drivers side looking right:

Aft looking forward through the hole in the trunk:

Couple intermediate steps:

I learned a couple tricks.  Even with mig where you have a free hand it is hard to hold the pipe really concentric and tack it. So I sacrificed a harbor freight tool to make a jig:

This works really well.  Some may say I destroyed a tool.  I prefer to think of it as giving the tool the chance to be "really useful." By the way, what kind of new world order lesson baloney is Thomas The Train aiming at with all the trains trying to be "really useful" and please Sir Topham Hatt constantly?  As though my kids should aspire to be kill themselves to be some fat cat's expendable tool for the chance at some restrained praise.

Another trick that I had forgotten is related to tack welding.  If you are tacking something so that it won't move around while you weld it out, by all means set your machine for your thickness and burn its brains out (bottom image below). If you are tacking something to check fit and there is a moderate chance you will need to separate the pieces again, set the machine for less voltage that you need.  For my 16 ga tubes I set the machine voltage as I would for thinner 18 ga, and tack for about 1/2 sec instead of 2 sec (top image below).  This way you don't have to destroy your work piece when you grind the tack off to separate the parts again.