Ha! Those Chinee guys,....some days you can just tell when they started a new crew of children at the weld station.
Look at this picture I posted earlier...
See all of the weld spooge oozing out of the center of my cream filled steel donut?
Means that the thing was in two sections, and they welded them together in the middle to make one concentric circle..
Unlike the domestic version that was twice the price, the weld was very prominent,...I figured that I'd use it as a cut line guide to follow along with while using a cutoff wheel on my grinder.
This is what they shipped me...as pictured this morning.
I look at the thing and think..." Cool, they machined the welds down,...now I won't have to grind them down after I cut them in half."
The line you see is dead center,...at lunchtime, I revised that cut line, and raised it up significantly (.500")
I figured by doingn that, it would leave the center to hang lower, and effectively raise the trumpet up 1/4", and give me more room to accurately cut the center weld out. It's the cut to the center that had to be perfect, as it will make up the mating surface to the top of the throttle body..so being able to see that cut line better was the priority.
So, I start cutting...
Get it all completely cut around the outside perimeter, I unclamp the donut out of my vise, and.......
The thing separates into two halfs.
( And I only cut the outside)
The 3rd shift child worker at the Ding Pao Steel donut factory forgot to weld the center...
..He did it on all three of them....More likely means that the whole run went out that way. The best part is that the mating surface in the center is machined flat...sits perfectly on top of the throttle body.
I have to section them. They are too wide to sit side by side. From my calculations,... .960" has to come off each side of the donuts.
Let's think this through...
TB spacing is 4.08 c-to-c. That makes it 2.04" to center between them.
The donut halfs are 6" in diameter .....means .96" has to be removed from each donut so they'll meet up in the middle and still be centered over the TB hole. Measured from the outside.
The bigger problem is how in the hell to make that mark, and how to square up a circle so I can cut a right angle cut down the side,......of a circle,....that's convex. With the tools I got.