Chapter 42: To Build a Mustang II (Patreon)

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

- Marcus Aurelius

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Santi had stared at the rear axle on the ground where it had fallen for a few minutes before making up his mind.

"Fuck it," he said. "You can't have something new unless you tear down the old."

"It seems like frustration has made a philosopher out of a gonk," Sasha teased with a giggle.

"It is as they say," Santi spoke, pushing out his chest. "When frustration arrives at your doorstep, you can either let it in and sulk, or push it aside and get going."

"Who the fuck ever said that?" Judy asked with a frown that was holding back a laugh.

"Me," Santi said. "Just now."

"Well then, Mr. Inspirational Quotes," Sasha quipped. "What are you going to do now that your magnum opus has sheared itself apart?"

"Well, there is this one quote I know that goes 'To conquer frustration, one must remain intensely focused on the outcome, not obstacles," Santi said as he grabbed a ratchet. "Time to get this show on the road."

Santi's new plan was to strip, assess, and fabricate. So he began stripping (ayyyyoooo).

Sasha, though limited in her knowledge of cars, stepped up to help him, and Judy also got to work without further discussion, both of them taking positions on either side of the car while Santi raised the lift and got under the car. After a few minutes, the driver's side fender came off in pieces. 

The fender separated from its mounting points the moment he applied force, and the corroded sheet metal tore away from the bolt head like wet paper. He discovered that the metal around the fastener had rusted into something that no longer qualified as metal in any sense. He managed to catch a part of the panel before it hit the ground, and part of it just crumbled off. He then set it on the workbench, and then another section of the lower edge crumbled off and scattered across the surface.

Since the Mustang had no hood, Santi moved onto the passenger fender and then the doors, which Judy helped lower to the ground carefully. Then the trunk lid. Each panel was removed with a care that was mostly unnecessary because they were too far gone to save regardless of how gently they handled it.

Santi cataloged each panel as it came off, using his Kiroshis to run composition analysis and structural assessment on each one of them, and finally filing the results in a running inventory file he overlaid on the corner of his vision in a grid of red and amber tags. Red for unsalvageable and amber for questionable. However, there was no green because nothing in it was in good condition.

By the time night had started to creep on Night City, the Boss 429 had been reduced to its frame. The body panels were stacked against the far wall in a pile that had been labeled as "scrap-fab feedstock," since that was the only future those panels had due to the fact that the oxidation had consumed too much of the original material to preserve it. However, the base iron was still iron, and the scrap-fab could break it down, purify it, and reforge it into usable stock. There was something about the idea of how the car would, in a sense, become part of its own replacement that made Santi's heart beat a little bit faster.

Sasha ended up staying the whole day, leaving once the clock hit ten after helping sweep the rust flakes and debris into a collection bin, and Judy left twenty minutes later, carrying a handful of bolts she'd salvaged from the Mustang's door hinges for her own project. Santi stayed on the ground floor for another hour, walking around the stripped unibody shell hanging on the now lowered lift, mapping the damage. 

Once the clock went past midnight and Julia had returned, he decided it was time to take a shower and go to sleep as well. While he showered, he went to bed knowing exactly what he was going to do tomorrow morning.

Santi woke up the next day to a delivery for a tool he had ordered: a sandblaster. It was a refurbished Petrochem industrial unit that Santi had picked up from a surplus vendor in the net, and it was pretty easy to get going. He connected it to a compressor, ensured it held a pressure of ninety PSI, and that the hopper was full of garnet abrasive media.

He also had to throw on a full respirator, sealed coveralls, and a face shield because, apart from being loud, a sandblaster would leave you filthy as shit. He looked like one of those scientists in movies that are messing with shit they shouldn't be touching. And even after all of that preparation, the fine grit found its way into his collar, his sleeves, and, somehow, his hair. The compressor ran continuously while the nozzle stripped away decades of corrosion in a controlled, hissing spray that revealed the bare metal underneath one square inch at a time.

He worked from the front of the car backward, and the front end was where the good news lived.

He determined that the engine bay and the front frame rails were in "fair" condition. The metal was pitted, scarred, and thinned in places, but it was still metal. It was still continuous and capable of bearing a load, as long as it wasn't too much. The front subframe mounting points were compromised at the surface but intact once he went past that point, the over-engineering of 1970 Dearborn manufacturing being the only reason any part of the original structure had survived a century of the world's new environment.

However, with every foot from the firewall back, the story seemed to deteriorate faster and faster.

Santi mapped the cabin floor inch by inch as the sandblaster stripped away the oxidation. With the help of a program he was running that fed the feed from his Kiroshis to one of the terminals on the ground floor, he was building a three-dimensional damage model that would then be sent back to him as a rendered model in the bottom left corner of his eyes as a heat map of structural integrity, starting off with a green that was rapidly fading to amber and then fading to red.

According to the program, the driver's footwell was solid along with the center tunnel. However, the outer floor sections, rocker panels, and seat mounting points were a lattice of rust that would have failed the moment anyone sat in the car. And as if that wasn't enough, by the time he reached the B-pillars, the heat map had gone full red and stayed there. The rear half of the cabin, which included the rear wheel arches, the trunk floor, the shock towers, and everything that connected them to the car's longitudinal structure, was beyond salvage. He pressed a screwdriver against the rear wheel arch, and it went through the metal like a hot knife through butter, leaving a hole rimmed with flaking oxide.

By the time Sasha arrived that afternoon with synthi-caf and a portable projector tucked under her arm, Santi had completed a full assessment and was sitting on an overturned crate in front of the stripped, sandblasted shell of the Mustang with his respirator hanging around his neck and rust dust in his hair while running the numbers.

"I brought a projector," Sasha said, setting the synthi-caf down on the workbench and looking around for a suitable wall. "Figured if we're going to be in here for a while, we might as well have some fun."

"You can use that wall," Santi said, pointing a finger at the northern wall without looking up. "It has the smoothest surface."

Sasha nodded and set it up while he worked. By the time the first film was casting flickering color across the concrete, Santi had pulled a pair of secondhand studio monitors out of the storage closet on the second floor and Sasha had wired them into a battered amp she'd brought in her bag, and the ground floor had transformed in the span of twenty minutes.

Music filled the space between the films, a rotating selection that ranged from old Chippin' In covers to Japanese city-pop to aggressive electronic music that netrunners seemed to gravitate toward.

As the music blasted, Santi pulled up the frame schematics on the fabrication terminal and began marking cut lines while the projector threw a movie from a long time ago, in galaxy far, far away, across the wall behind him. Sasha sat cross-legged on the workbench with a tablet in her hands, reading something of her own while the music ran.

The Widowmaker's new frame was going to be a fabricated space-frame architecture made up of 4130 chromoly tubing and AR550 plate that would form the structural skeleton that the armor and the body panels would be attached to. It would be stronger than the original unibody by an order of magnitude. 

Santi had also decided to cut the salvageable sections of the original frame into segments and layer them into the interior structure of the new space frame. The original metal would be laminated into the frame's interior as a core layer, sandwiched between the new structural tubing and the armor plate, where it would work to add mass, dampening, and continuity.

Essentially, the new Widowmaker would have the old Boss 429 inside it, using the Dearborn steel like a ninety-nine-year-old ghost riding inside of the machine.

Sure, it was not the most efficient engineering decision he could have made, and a purist would have argued that laminating old, compromised metal into a new frame added weight without proportional strength, and though they would have been correct, Santi had already made up his mind that the car was going to carry its own history in its frame. A half-percent efficiency penalty was a price he was willing to pay for something that efficiency couldn't buy.

There was also another major change he was going to do. Since a large portion of the cabin managed to survive the trials and tribulations that came with the passage of time... he was going to split it down the middle.

The decision to do so hadn't been a spur-of-the-moment type of thing, but something Santi had long since decided on. The original 1970 Boss 429 had a front track width of 59.3 inches and a rear track of 58.5 inches, a measurement that was narrow by any standard, and way too narrow to properly convert 4,500 horsepower to the ground without turning all of it into wheelspin. In Santi's new design, the new front track would be 72 inches while the rear would be 75 inches.

It would be wider at the back than the front, creating a deliberate asymmetry that shifted the car's dynamic balance rearward under power and gave it the specific handling characteristics he was designing for.

The final body would be wider still, coming in at around 82 inches across the front widebody fenders and 85 inches across the rears, its aggressive flares adding another 10 inches of visual presence on each side beyond the track width itself. The Widowmaker was intentionally designed to be aggressive and one of a kind, sporting 21-inch wheels, 355/30 up front and 405/30 at the rear. The tires would be mounted on forged aluminum wheels that Santi would machine on the CNC from his aluminum stock.

The wider rear track also increased the rear axle's resistance to lateral load transfer, and under cornering, the rear tires would hold grip longer before breaking loose. But the compound-boosted V8 would produce enough torque to override that grip on demand, and the wide track would make the breakaway progressive and controllable.

If the program Santi had been using to mock this all up wasn't bullshitting him, the car would drift with grace, sliding sideways at speed and coming back into line without drama. And at a projected top speed of two hundred and eighty-seven miles an hour in a straight line, the wide track would plant the car to the road, resisting the aerodynamic forces that made narrower cars quite literally shake at half that speed.

If he really wanted to integrate the old into the new, creating his own monster, becoming Frankenstein, then splitting the original cabin was the price of admission. Santi marked the centerline, then followed it with the plasma cutter's guide beam while Sasha turned a page on her tablet and the music shifted to Frank Sinatra's "My Way."

Once he mock-followed it a few times, he ignited the plasma cutter, sending blue-white arcs that threw hard shadows across the floor, and began cutting.

The hissing roar of ionized gas consuming metal at four thousand degrees accompanied Frank Sinatra's voice, the sparks cascading from the cut line in a waterfall of orange and white as Frank's voice rose.

He cut the centerline first, running the torch along the guide beam with a steady and controlled feed rate he hadn't really practiced, but had rewatched a BD more than enough times to have it be second nature. He then made lateral cuts, separating the salvageable front end from the junk rear, each cut following the marks he had laid out on the schematic and projected onto the car itself through his Kiroshis. (Only visible to him)

Once Santi got tired of cutting, he dropped onto the couch with Sasha and watched a new movie called "The Matrix," which, although it was well over half a century old, reminded him of Night City's reality. Sasha and Santi spent the rest of the day just watching movies and chatting, and by the time they finished, it was 1 am.

Santi offered Sasha to stay over in the spare room they had, and Julia, who had stepped out of her room to grab some water, ended up raising an eyebrow at him when she saw Sasha. However, she didn't say anything about it and told Sasha she was more than welcome to stay, since it was too late to go home and, with the war drawing ever closer, the city had only gotten more dangerous at night.

Sasha agreed and became the first person since Alejandro to sleep under the same roof as the mother-son duo.

The next morning, Sasha went home since she had a gig lined up for later in the day. While she was gone, Judy came in with her toolbox and a bag of jerky and was met with the cabin having been separated into two halves, and the junk rear sectioned into feedstock-sized pieces by the scrap-fab. She stopped dead in her tracks and stared at what used to be the frame of the car before glancing towards Santi and setting her toolbox down on the bench beside the projector.

"Well, it looks like you've been busy since I left yesterday," she said.

"Can't stop, won't stop," Santi said as he chugged down a cherry-flavored can of NiCola. He was running on sugar and caffeine, and his focus had put him into something approaching a flow state.

"I need to make the junction box housings for the last," Judy said. "I was hoping I'd be able to use the CNC machine for a couple hours today."

"Go for it," Santi said. "I'm not going to be using it today anyway."

The two of them worked in parallel. Judy fed her own polymer stock into the CNC and machined the junction boxes for the firetruck with extreme focus, pulling each finished part off the machine and holding it up to the light with pride. With her skills, she had essentially improved the original design while reproducing it.

At the same time, Santi was running the salvageable front-end segments through the gear cutter, trimming them to precise dimensions that would allow them to nest inside the new chromoly space-frame as a laminated layer.

Between cutting sessions, he fed the junk metal into the scrap-fab. The machine accepted the corroded panels and rusted members, heated the material, purified it, and extruded it as clean and usable steel billets that Santi racked beside the raw materials Orsen had delivered.

Judy ran her own scrap through the machine whenever Santi declared he wasn't going to be using it for the time being, feeding the copper stock and polymer blanks she needed for the firetruck's electrical system through the same processing cycle and pulling out material that was cleaner and more consistent than anything she had been able to source. The rebuild of the firetruck that had been bottlenecked for months on parts she couldn't quite get her hands on was rolling smoothly now.

Being able to use the CNC machine to cut her junction box housings to the original NCFD spec in a fraction of the time her hand tools would have taken allowed her to speed up the process significantly. It had also allowed her to thicken the wall section at the stress riser that had caused the factory originals to crack after a decade of thermal cycling.

"Aaannnd that is housing number fourteen," Judy said as she pulled the last one off the CNC and held it up to the overhead lights with pride. "Cast from recycled polymer, machined to spec, and better than the originals because let's be honest, I'm smarter than the gonks who designed them in 2043."

"And quite humble as well," Santi said from under the car.

"Mhmm," Judy nodded. She set the housing in her crate with the others and came over to look at the cut lines he was making on the front subframe. "You know, when I first saw this car, I thought you were insane. But now I think you're insane and also possibly a genius, which is worse because it means that now I have another O.T on my hands and you might actually pull this off."

"I appreciate the vote of confidence," Santi said.

"You're welcome," Judy said as she watched him guide the plasma cutter along a lateral cut. "At the pace I'm going, I'd say the firetruck's going to be done in about two weeks, maybe less if the last batch of housings fits right. Then I'm going to take that baby for a spin around the city."

"Nice! Just don't get arrested or anything. Those pigs will make up any excuse to fuck with someone who doesn't have the ddies to do anything about it," Santi said. "But once you're done with it, I could use a second pair of hands on the body panels. When the frame's together, I'm going to need to shape the new exterior from flat stock on the English wheel I have coming in. It's a two-person job."

"English wheel?" Judy asked with interest. "You know how to run one of those?"

"It's not hard to learn," Santi said.

"What're you gonna do, watch a ton of BDs?" Judy asked with sarcasm.

"Yyyyyyuuuuuppppp," Santi confirmed.

"Welp, I guess they're useful for more things than just entertainment," Judy said. "I wouldn't mind helping."

Sasha dropped by later that same day, after she had finished her gig and Judy had gone home. She put on some music and made sure not to get in Santi's way, sitting on the couch while scrolling through the net and disappearing into her own tasks. She eventually fell asleep on the couch and woke up at two in the morning to find Santi at the welding bench, hunched over a practice joint with the TIG torch in one hand and a filler rod in the other.

A spent respirator cartridge sat beside a pile of tests that all looked almost the same. He had been running BD skill-transfers he had bought from Muamar Reyes every night in his bed, riding recordings made by master fabricators, acquiring data and the feed rate of the filler rod and the experience that allowed him to read the weld puddle and adjust in real time. Through the use of the BDs, Santi had basically become an expert at welding, but he still wanted to experiment before he actually started welding anything together, so he was putting in the hours.

"That looks clean," Sasha said as she put on a pair of welding goggles. "That looks like the BD you showed me."

"I, uh, I don't think I'm quite there yet," Santi said without looking up. "The guy in the BD had better heat control than I do and was better at reading this puddle bullshit."

"You were working on this when I got here at nine, and it's now two in the morning," Sasha said. "You've been at this for five hours."

"Actually, I've only been at this for four hours and forty minutes," Santi said as he killed the arc and flipped up his mask. "But who's counting?"

"I am, apparently," she said as she grabbed one of the test welds that was scattered across the bench and studied it, running her thumb along the weld bead. "I think you should go to bed, Santi. It's not like you're going to finish this in one night. The car will still be in pieces in the morning."

"Yeah," Santi sighed softly. "You're right. You should also just stay over as well. Gangers are up in arms tonight, and MaxTac has been deployed to three different sites since eleven."

"I will," Sasha said, blushing a bit, and they both went to bed.

Another two days went by, and as they did, Santi noticed that his mother had been changing for a bit now. Julia was going out more. It seemed as if the reunion with her old Militech friends had reactivated a social life that had been dormant since Santi could remember. She was filling her calendar with lunches and dinners and errands that ran late and the occasional evening she described only as "plans."

Santi didn't ask her for any details, though he suspected that his mother had found herself an input and just didn't think about what she was getting up to during her outings. He'd transferred enough eddies into her account that she never had to think about money, and watching her spend it on herself, on friends, and on a life that belonged to her rather than being chained down by poverty was one of the few unambiguously good things in his life.

And she was also smiling more and differently. Her smile was brighter now and unperformed, as if she was remembering that she was allowed to enjoy her own life, that widowhood and the long grinding years of survival in Night City had not permanently disqualified her from happiness.

Santi had caught her humming in the kitchen and laughing at things on her tablet. And when she came home late, she would look pleased rather than tired. Unlike his mother, he didn't tease her about anything, especially not when she came home at eleven that night with a smile she was trying and failing to suppress.

Finally, after a full week of prep work, the CNC began producing the first structural members of the new frame. Santi had spent two nights programming the machine, translating the space-frame schematic into the CNC's G-code format line-by-line. The schematic itself was a piece of "engineering" that Santi had been working on since he had gotten his hands on the Mustang, refining it and re-refining it through simulations and stress analysis tests. Every tube, gusset, and mounting point had been designed to carry its share of the seventy-five hundred pounds and to distribute the recoil of a roof-mounted M2067 Defender through the cage and into the frame rails without causing any flex on the body panels.

The chromoly tubing stock went in raw with a two-inch outer diameter and 0.120-inch wall thickness made from 4130 alloy. The CNC's cutting head went to work, releasing a sustained high-pitched whine that vibrated the air.

After some time, the first piece to come off the machine was a front frame rail section, 38 inches long and mitered at both ends to accept the gusset plates that would tie it into the main hoop of the roll cage. Santi pulled it from the fixture, held it in both hands, and turned it under the overhead lights, inspecting it and ensuring that the cut surfaces were clean and that the miters were accurate.

He set it on the assembly table beside the lamination segments from the original car, and ran his hand across both pieces. The old metal was rough and pitted, carrying the texture of its century, while the new metal was smooth. 

"Looks like you finally made the first piece," Judy said from across the floor, where she was packing her finished junction boxes into a crate to move them all together to the firetruck that was basically parked right outside. "You should frame it."

"It's a frame rail," Santi said.

"Exactly," Judy said with a shit-eating grin at her own joke.

Santi chuckled and shook his head, and Judy left to work outside on the firetruck. He kept on working, making the second rail section, the third, the fourth, and the main hoop components, which were the primary arch that would span the cabin from rocker to rocker and tie into the A-pillars at the front and the C-pillars at the rear. He then made the cross-members that would brace the floor plane and distribute lateral loads during cornering.

Gusset plates that would be welded at every major node to prevent joints from rotating under stress, suspension mounting brackets were machined to the tight tolerances demanded by the hydropneumatic suspension system, and an X-bracing that would be placed under the floor of the cabin. Each piece came off the machine in the sequence Santi had programmed, each one measured against the schematic and confirmed within spec, and by the end of the day, the assembly table held the beginnings of a space frame that would become the skeleton of a machine unlike anything Night City had ever seen.

On the following day, Santi was ready to begin welding them together. He set up the jig on the ground floor. It was a fabricated steel table with adjustable clamps and reference points that held the frame components in their correct spatial relationship while he tacked them into position. Once everything was in place, he lit up the TIG torch, and the first bead he laid on the first joint of the new frame was the best weld he had ever produced, and probably would ever produce.

All of those hours spent rewatching BDs and training on his own with the scrap, all of it converged in a single structural bead that joined two pieces of chromoly tubing into the beginning of the Widowmaker's front subframe.

Sasha arrived as he did, and took a seat on the workbench with her synthi-caf in hand, watching the sparks cascade across the jig.

The space-frame grew, the welds held, and the music played all the while a certain NUSA commander was making ground on his way toward the paused Pacifica project.

Making and welding the rest of the frame together would probably take Santi another two weeks, maybe three, and building the engine and transmission would take about the same time, if not longer. This project will probably take him a couple of months, but with every weld he made, every rail he joined, every part of the frame that grew, the Widowmaker came closer and closer to being made.