The Novice's guide to mini-tubbing a 68-69 Camaro

[BBC69Camaro]

Repost from over at PT.
http://www.pro-touring.com/forum/showthread.php?t=46900

[WARNING Image intensive].

I recently finished mini-tubbing my 69 Camaro and I thought I would share my experience and photos. When I was attempting to do this project I found a few documented installs but it still left a lot of questions. Hopefully this guide will help answer a few more questions.

First I took a welding class in prep to be able to tackle this project. If you don't know how to weld I think you can still get 90% of the way there and then just hire (or bribe a buddy with some beer) to come in and weld everything up once you have everything fitting how you want it. Getting everything fitted properly was 90%+ of the battle.

Keep in mind I had never done any metal/sheet work before. The goal wasn’t a perfect show install but one that would pass as factory work so that you couldn’t tell a mini-tubbing had been done. I don’t claim to be an expert; I am novice and so take everything I say with a grain of salt. There also probably better ways of doing things. Feel free to make suggestions and corrections.

This is not intended to be a guide on how to learn to weld; I am too much a novice at welding, so I am going to gloss over the welding and technique.

Also keep in mind that in my install I didn’t have to deal with putting in a new upper shock cross-member as I was going with a G-Bar.

I am a visual person so I took lots of pictures during the project and will use them to describe how I completed the project.

Tools:
* Common automotive tools
* Plasma Cutter (if you can beg borrow or steal one), it will make this project go 10x faster than other methods. 2nd choice would be air cut-off wheel (buy lots of cut-off discs).
* Angle Grinder with cupped wire brush (for taking off undercoating and paint).
* Lots of C-Clamps and/or long bar clamps (like used in wood working)
* Protective clothing, mask and goggles.
* MIG welder if you are going to do your own welding.
* Drill and assorted drill bits
* Spot weld removal tool (makes drilling spot welds a lot faster, but you can do without it)
* Scribe (for drawing lines on metal).
* Rotisserie if you can manage it, it would make life super easy on a project like this. Not necessary but like the plasma cutter would make it go extremely faster.


Going to try to break this down in very short descriptive steps:

1. Properly support vehicle.
2. Remove all rear suspension component, gas tank etc.
3. Remove rear trunk lid and everything from the trunk.
4. Remove interior (front seats too you are going to be working a lot in here you need the room).
5. Now the fun starts, use the angle grinder with wire cupped brush and begin to clean off the paint and undercoating in the wheel wells:







In these pics I cleaned off more than I needed to. You really only need to find the welds that hold the rear seat brackets and deck lid braces. After that you can cut out the inner tub: