After getting the engine bay welded up I still had to close up the front of the engine bay at the radiator mount. Duplicating what I did in the Mustang Chicken Coupe I wanted to do a sliding panel that can be quickly lifted up to open the front to allow for easy removal of mulch. Since the panel where the radiator goes is more or less flat, I had to add something to either side of the opening to hold the sliding panel. I ended up taking some fence post and cutting two sections from this. This post is about 1 1/2" in diameter. I cut two pieces about 18" long and then cut a slot lengthwise along the entire cut of each pipe. Doing this made the pipe open up since pipe is nothing more than sheet metal rolled up and welded lengthwise into a pipe. This slot in each pipe is where the sliding panel will fit through. I finished up by welding the pipes to either side of the radiator panel opening. Now I actually got lucky in sourcing the sliding panel for this setup. I ended up finding a piece of sheet metal that was cut from some larger piece in the past that ended up actually being perfect for this position. It had the right height and width to slide right in without resistance or being too short or too high. This made the access panel sub-project go real fast. Lastly I bolted the hood back on. Even though the latch is still in place the hood shuts without engaging the latch, which is fine since there is no need for the latch to be engaged. I'll probably end up removing the latch mechanism to sell with the other parts later on. Now its on to the cab. On the cab I had to do a couple of things. One was patch up the hole where the shifter popped up from the transmission. This was pretty simple, just grinding the paint from the surrounding metal to expose the bare metal then cutting a patch of sheet metal to weld in place over the hole. After doing these couple of quick tasks I had the shifter hole covered up. The next thing on the list was cutting a hole from the back of the cab into the bed. Just like with the firewall hole, I cut a large enough hole to allow the chickens to pass through. Unlike the firewall though, I had two panels to cut through - the back of the cab and the front of the bed. After chopping through this with the reciprocating saw I then pulled the metal together between the bed and the cab and went to work welding on that to get the two sections welded together so bugs or rain wouldn't get through that easily. With these couple of simple things taken care of I can start on the cab. I have to put in a couple of roosting posts, and install an outlet box for the electric heater I want to put in, as well as a light fixture and a switch box to turn said light on and off. Next time it will be cab day.
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