Over the last 5 or 6 months the old Niva has undergone a bit of a transformation. It is now starting to look like the line drawing you saw earlier. The roof has come off, the whole body has been shortened by 320mm and the doors are welded shut. This is something I have always wanted to do to a Niva. Now that I have got one which I don't have to keep road legal I can cut and chop to my hearts content. It always amazes me how easy it is to cut a car to pieces. Once I had removed the doors, tailgate and rear side windows the roof took less than an hour to remove using a hacksaw and an angle grinder. Another hour later I had cut the piece out of the middle and I was left with two body halves. I had cut through the floorpan and chassisrails in two different places for two reasons. It made the joints staggered which makes the whole assembly stronger and the chassisrails splay out in front of the rear suspension mounts so I had to cut them in a place where I could actually join them together again without them being at different widths. Welding the body halves together again was a real pain because of all the underseal and paint catching fire all the time. You can scrape most of this off but there only needs to be a little bit of underseal to make lots of smoke and (poisonous) fumes. Add a few rusted bits of panel steel into the picture and welding becomes a nightmare.
Once I had joined the two body halves back together I trimmed the sheetmetal above the rear wheel arches to just about level with the bottom lip of what once was the tailgate opening. Because the 320mm was taken all out of the door opening there wasn't exactly a lot of room between what was left of the B-pillar and the steeringwheel. I needed to cut the B-pillar down the form part of the instep. Once these pillars were trimmed below the rest of the body shape the whole body became very weak, so much so that I thought I had wrecked the car beyond repair. The remedy I thought was to weld some 75x50 RHS in between the rear wheel arches and the remains of the B-pillars followed by some 25x25 square tube in two triangles in the door openings to form the instep. No luck. This did nothing to improve body rigidity. Even though a rollcage was part of the plan to stiffen up the structure I wanted the body without the cage to be reasonably stiff in itself. It wasn't until the doorskins were welded back into place and the sheetmetal top plates which close off the gap between the inner and outer skins were in place that the body became rigid again. It is amazing how much strenght there is in a piece of 0.8mm thick sheetmetal once it has some shape to it. The doorskins were cut of the old doors, this way I could retain the shape of the body into the side panels. The top plates on both sides are in two pieces, one for the instep and one for above the wheel arch. I rolled the edges over by clamping the sheetmetal between two lenghts of 75x50 RHS and hammering the edges over.
The windscreen surround was finished off by welding the inner and outer skins of the roof together. I then welded 3mm steel plates over the openings in the A-pillars to accept the tubing for the cage.
To finish of the area around where the tailgate used to be I rolled another piece of sheetmetal into a rightangle to cover the lip where the tailgate rubber used to fit. This makes it all look nice and tidy.
The cage is made from some heavy wall galvanised tubing salvaged from a tennis court fence. Cheap and nasty but it does the job. I had considered getting some tube bent up but I am trying to build the vehicle for as low a cost as possible. So I opted for the free galvanised tube. Once painted it shouldn't look too bad. I reinforced the points where the cage is welded to the body with 120mm square plates made from 3mm steel. With the cage in place the body is stiffer than ever, it should be stiffer than a standard Niva but we will find this out for sure once we get the beastie off-road for the first time.
But before we can go and play there is a driveshaft to be shortened as well as the handbrake cable, brakeline and fuel line. Since I have aquired a lathe I was now able to shorten the driveshaft myself by parting off the tailpiece, squaring up the rest of the tube and welding the whole thing back together. The rear driveshaft is now much shorter than the front driveshaft.
I had to cut a new hole in the floorpan to fit the handbrake lever as the handbrake lever used the be positioned in that part which I cut out. The cable was shortened by attaching the treaded adjustment part of the handbrake cable directly to the lever itself and discarding the actual cable.
As the front seats now sit right up against the rear wheel arches they intrude into the space of the fuel tank. So I have shifted the fuel tank into the boot area. This meant lengthening the fuel line and building some sort of support for holding the fuel tank in place. This same support will do double duty as seatbelt anchoring point. I want to install 4 point harness belts. I would also like to mount the spare wheel above the fuel tank. The idea behind this is to get as much weight of the front wheels as I can. The back end of the car is very light now. The rear springs are at full extension so I can use some weight in the back to get the overall weight distribution closer to ideal.
