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car butchery
Wednesday, May 7 2008
At this point the old Honda Civic hatchback is like a slaughtered cow from which I can select and remove various choice cuts. Instead of meat, however, the cuts are made of steel. For my purposes, the best of these are the large expanses of sheet metal. Yesterday I'd removed the choicest piece of all, the roof, which had been attached via only six narrow pillars. Today I harvested the two large pieces of exterior sheet metal left, behind each of the doors. These pieces weren't especially large, measuring no more than about eighteen inches by twenty four inches. They were harder to extract than the roof had been, since they were attached on all sides by series of spot welds made by mid-90s Japanese robot technology. I used the reciprocating saw to cut along the edges of the panel, sometimes cutting through several sheets of metal simultaneously. The only real problem areas were the places were the body was thicker than the length of the blade, but in those cases I could usually withdraw somewhat so that the tip of the blade was moving back and forth in the empty space inside the enclosed void. Initially I'd plan to recycle nearly all the scrap metal, but lately I've been thinking that I should stockpile much of it for welding projects. I can just hide it back behind the woodshed and no one will even know it's there.
The hatchback, with one panel removed behind one of the doors.
The hatchback, with two panels removed behind the doors.
Clarence (top) and Julius (aka Stripey) enjoying the hatchback at a further state of strippage.
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